Holidaying busmen, misleading herrings and flying pigs: it’s another collection of strange English idioms and their origin stories.
If you’re new round here, I research an odd English idiom every Friday and share what I discover over on my LinkedIn. I then recap each month’s findings on this blog to make the fun go a little further.
Now, to April’s phrases!
“A Red Herring.”
🎣This one means a piece of information or a question that distracts you from the main point. It’s a popular trope in mystery novels but can also be used in everyday speech (sometimes accidentally).
This is a fishy tale in more ways than one…
To start off with, let’s take the herring itself. There is no species of herring that is naturally red in colour. Instead, the term refers to a herring that’s been so highly smoked or thoroughly cured in brine that the flesh goes a reddish colour (and smells really strongly!).
But what does a very pungent fish have to do with a misleading statement? 🐟
For a long time, the received wisdom was that these very strongly cured herrings were used to lay a false trail for hounds to distract them from the trail of a fox or other animal. Why you’d want to do this isn’t clear, though some people thought it could be a way of training them to pay attention in the face of distraction.
More recently though, some etymologists have theorised that this was a misunderstanding of the actual practice. Rather than misleading the hounds, the fish was used to encourage them to run so that horses could grow used to the chaos of a hunting situation. Convoluted or what? 🐕
So was the theory about distracting hounds a red herring in itself? Well, yes and no.
Political commentator William Cobbet wrote an article in 1807 where he claimed that, as a child, he’d used a red herring to draw hounds away from the trail of a hare he wanted to hunt. He used this as a metaphor to criticise the British press for being misled by phony reports about Napoleon and taking their eyes off important matters closer to home (fake news!). This use of the phrase seems to have been enough to cement it in the public consciousness in the years that followed.
There’s a chance that Cobbet was making up the story about his childhood for the sake of the metaphor but whether he was or not, it seems we have him to thank for this useful but oh so fishy phrase.
“Ring the Changes.”
🔔This one means to do something differently or to try a new option.
I hope you’re wearing your Sunday best because we’re off to church this time.
In 17th-century England, a practice called “full circle ringing” began to grow in popularity. This involved swinging a church bell almost a full circle, something which meant the ringer could actually control when the clapper would hit the side of the bell. ⛪
This led to the introduction of “change ringing”, the practice of ringing bells in very precise mathematical sequences or “changes”. So, to ring the changes meant to run through a set of different possible combinations.
The use of the phrase outside the bellringing context is almost as old as the phrase itself. Gary Martin at the Phrase Finder cites Thomas Adams’ 1614 “divells banket described in sixe sermons” where he says: “Some ring the Changes of opinions.” (And if you think I included that simply because of the fun ye olde spelling… You know me too well).
There’s a slightly less ecclesiastical sting to the tail though. During the 19th century, ring the changes also somehow became slang for passing counterfeit money. This supposedly contributed to the birth of the phrase “a dead ringer” (which I covered earlier in the year, bringing us neatly full circle… appropriate given the history in this post, right?) 🪙
“Busman’s Holiday”
🚌 This one means doing something in your relaxation time that you typically do for work.
Workaholics, assemble!
This one is usually said to come from the fact that – before owning a car was practical for most folks – if a bus driver or conductor wanted to go out anywhere on his day off, he’d usually end up taking a bus. Fun fact: given the vintage of the phrase, the buses originally in question were of the horse-drawn variety. 🐴
However, it isn’t necessarily quite as straightforward as it seems at first glance.
One popular (but unsupported) theory was that the bus drivers were so concerned about their horses and buses that they intentionally rode on them on their days off to keep a sharp eye on the relief driver.
Another is that bus workers treated riding the bus as the holiday, rather than a means of getting to it. The Word Histories website quotes this 1888 interview from the Pall Mall Gazette:
“And how do the ’bus-drivers spend their holidays?” the interviewer asked.—“Some of them lie in bed all day, undoubtedly; while quite a large number of them go round to chat with ‘old pals,’ as they call their ancient friends in the same occupation. Many spend the day on the box seats of ’buses on various routes, alongside of old friends.”
However, Michael Quinion at Worldwide Words thinks this is probably a jokey story that got told so often it became accepted truth. It would make the story a little less interesting but a win for work-life balance!
Whatever the origin, the phrase is British and dates back as far as 1888 and probably further than that (given that the writer obviously expects people to know what he’s talking about!). It spread to the rest of the English-speaking world in the decades that followed and (just about) survives to this day.
Side note: I first encountered this phrase thanks to the mystery novelist Dorothy L Sayers who was so taken with it that she used it in the titles of two of her books. So in a way, this phrase is brought to you by murder.
Quickfire Round: Dogs, hogs and boats, oh my!
I’ve been at this idiom lark for over a year now and in the course of my research, I’ve encountered a fair few phrases that have fun or fascinating bits of trivia attached to them but don’t quite stretch to a post of their own. So I thought I’d ring the changes and showcase some of them.
🐶 Going to the dogs: Something that’s sliding towards ruin.
This one quite literally refers to unwanted food being thrown to the dogs (or meat that was unfit for human consumption being turned into dog food). In Shakespeare’s time, you could seemingly use it as a way of denigrating anything you thought was useless. The titular character in Macbeth exclaims: “Throw physic to the dogs; I’ll none of it.”
🐷 Pigs might fly: a sarcastic way of saying something is vanishingly unlikely.
This seems to have started life as the wonderful “Pigs fly in the ayre with their tayles forward”, though how that came about, we tragically have no idea. However, it appears in two fabulously named books – Walter Haddon’s “Against Jerome Osorius Byshopp of Siluane in Portingall and against his Slaunderous Invectives” and John Withals’s “A Shorte Dictionarie for Yonge Begynners” – so that’s something!
⛵ In the doldrums: feeling down and lacklustre
Doldrum used to refer to a lazy/slothful/slow person. It also refers to an area near the equator where ships are prone to get stuck due to the lack of surface winds. One source I found suggested that this troublesome part of the ocean actually got its name because people misunderstood reports that described ships as “in the doldrums” (struggling to make any headway due to the lack of wind) and thought that was the name of the area – I really hope that’s true!
That’s it for now. If you’d like to get in on the action for May, feel free to join me over on my LinkedIn. Alternatively, just wait for the multi-pack coming in early June. And if you have a favourite idiom, I’d love to hear it!
Anna Lodwick 