A couple of viewers have e-mailed in, including Ann and John Berry, to ask what we're doing when we beat about the bush - why do we beat about the bush? And English is full of hunting metaphors. It was a highly important aristocratic pursuit, whether or not we agree with it nowdays. But to beat about the bush is from hunting - from bird hunting, in fact. And it is simply, as you might guess, some of the participants rousing the birds by beating the bushes and cousing them to fly off so that others can catch the quarry in nets. Of course, today, still, grouse hunting and other forms of hunt still use this method of beating, and they have beaters. It drew me onto red herring, because red herring has been - I suppose inevitably - one of the main sources of red herrings in etymology throuhout the ages. We've never been quite sure where it comes from, and there have been so many guesses. But we think we have now cracked it. It goes back to William Cobbett, who was a radical journalist. HAted the English political system, which he lampooned and called "the Old Corruption". He was deeply out of love with politics of his day, which is in the 19th century, and he wrote a story - perhaps fictional, we're not sure - in a political weekly about how, as a boy, he had managed to deflect hounds from chasing a hare by dragging a red herring, ie a highly smoked herring, across the trail. The reason he told this story is he wanted to use it as a metaphor to really give the press a hard time, because thay'd allowed itself... or they'd allowed themselves to be misled by false information about a supposed defeat of Napoleon, a different one to the one we know, which made the press take their eye off very important domestic matters, and he said that they had deliberately created this red herring in order to deflect interest in what was really going on at home. And, of course, we talk about political red herrings to this day, and the phrase simply slipped into the mainstream from there.
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