Meaning
A deliberate provocation, sure to bring about an adverse reaction.
Origin
In the 17th century, to wave a red rag at someone was merely to chatter with them - 'red rag' was then a slang term for the tongue. This usage is cited in print as early as 1605 and is nicely illustrated in Francis Grose's definition in <em>The Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue</em>, 1785:
<blockquote>"Shut your potatoe trap, and give your redrag a holiday."
</blockquote>The waving of a cloth rag at an animal to distract it may have been a common practice for centuries, but it wasn't until the 1700s that it was documented in print. The animal in question wasn't, as we might suppose, a bull. The first creature known to be susceptible to rag waving was that most dim-witted of birds, the pheasant. This was cited in Trenchard and Gordon's religious essays, <em>Cato's Letters</em>, 1724:
<blockquote>Foxes are trapann'd [<em>trapped</em>] by Traces, Pheasants by a red Rag, and other Birds by a Whistle; and the same is true of Mankind.
</blockquote>Next come vipers, which were also thought to be adversely affected by red rags, as was recorded in <em>The Times</em> in March 1809:
<blockquote>"Truth to a lawyer was like a red rag to a viper - it extracted his venom."
</blockquote>Bulls come rather a long way down the list of red rag sensitive beings found in early citations. Before them we find turkeys and, not to be left out, Frenchmen - as in Catherine Gore's <em>Memoires of a Peeress</em>, 1837:
<blockquote>"They [the English] have no ardour for gratuitous quarrels; they do not fire up like a turkey-cock or a Frenchman, at sight of a red rag."
</blockquote><img hspace="4" height="161" align="right" width="232" src="http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2006/12/21/bull372.jpg" alt="Red rag to a bull" />It wasn't until 1873 that someone decided that bulls were to be added to the list, when Charlotte Yonge included an allusion in the novel <em>Pillars of the House</em>:
<blockquote>"Jack will do for himself if he tells Wilmet her eyes are violet; it is like a red rag to a bull."
</blockquote>The inclusion of bulls to the list was rather misguided. Bulls don't have the optical equipment to distinguish red from other colours, so the 'red rag to a bull' phrase gives the wrong impression. It is generally accepted that bulls are enraged by the waving of the cloth rather than its colour and that a green rag would work just as well. Personally, I've never been close enough to an annoyed bull for a double-blind trial, so to speak, and that is the way I prefer to keep it.
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