Readers should be familiar with Robert Claiborne's earlier books, especially Our Marvelous Native Tongue: The Life and Times of the English Language. One might say that subtitling the present book A Book of Lost Metaphors is an example of a loose canon [ sic ] — unless metaphor is taken in its broadest sense—but one is unlikely to find red herrings here: the etymologies of a few hundred words and phrases are given, many not readily findable in standard works of reference.
You should be familiar with Claiborne's earlier books.  One might say that subtitling the book A Book of Lost Metaphors is an example of a loose cannon, but it's unlikely to find red herrings here.