Red herring

As an informal fallacy, the red herring falls into a broad class of relevance fallacies. Unlike the straw man, which involves a distortion of the other party's position, the red herring is a seemingly plausible, though ultimately irrelevant, diversionary tactic. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a red herring may be intentional or unintentional; it is not necessarily a conscious intent to mislead. The expression is mainly used to assert that an argument is not relevant to the issue being discussed. For example, "I think we should make the academic requirements stricter for students. I recommend you support this because we are in a budget crisis, and we do not want our salaries affected." The second sentence, though used to support the first sentence, does not address that topic. == Intentional device ==

In fiction and non-fiction, a red herring may be a false clue intended to lead readers or audiences toward a mistaken conclusion. For example, the character of Bishop Aringarosa in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code is presented for most of the novel as if he is at the centre of the church's conspiracies, but is later revealed to have been innocently duped by the true antagonist of the story. The character's name is a loose Italian translation of "red herring" (; actually meaning , and very close to , ). There is a red herring in the first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, where the murderer writes at the crime scene the word ('revenge' in German), leading the policeand the readerto mistakenly presume that a German was involved. A red herring is often used in legal studies and exam problems to mislead and distract students from reaching a correct conclusion about a legal issue, intended as a device that tests students' comprehension of underlying law and their ability to properly discern material factual circumstances. == History ==

s "kippered" by smoking, salting and artificially dyeing until made reddish-brown, i.e., a "red herring". Prior to the existence of refrigeration, kipper was known for being strongly pungent. In 1807, William Cobbett claimed that he as a child together with other children used a kipper to lead hunting dogs away from the scent of a hare the children intended to hunt—an apocryphal story that was probably the origin of the idiom. There is no fish species called "red herring", rather it is a name given to a particularly strong kipper, made from fish (typically herring) strongly cured in brine or heavily smoked. This process makes the fish particularly pungent smelling and, with strong enough brine, turns its flesh reddish. In this literal sense, as a strongly cured kipper, the term can be dated to the late 13th century in the Anglo-Norman poem The Treatise by Walter of Bibbesworth, which then first appears in Middle English in the early 14th century: "" The figurative sense of "red herring" has traditionally been said to originate from a supposed technique of training scent hounds. Later, when the dog was being trained to follow the faint odour of a fox or a badger, the trainer would drag a red herring perpendicular to the animal's trail to confuse the dog. The dog eventually learned to follow the original scent rather than the stronger scent. A variation of this story is given, without mention of its use in training, in The Macmillan Book of Proverbs, Maxims, and Famous Phrases (1976), with the earliest use cited being from W. F. Butler's Life of Napier, published in 1849. ''Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable'' (1981) gives the full phrase as "Drawing a red herring across the path", an idiom meaning "to divert attention from the main question by some side issue"; here, once again, a "dried, smoked and salted" herring when "drawn across a fox's path destroys the scent and sets the hounds at fault." Another variation of the dog story is given by Robert Hendrickson (1994) who says escaping convicts used the pungent fish to throw off hounds in pursuit. According to a pair of articles by Professor Gerald Cohen and Robert Scott Ross published in Comments on Etymology (2008), supported by etymologist Michael Quinion and accepted by the Oxford English Dictionary, the idiom did not originate from a hunting practice. The earliest reference to using herring for distracting hounds is an article published on 14 February 1807 by radical journalist William Cobbett in his polemical periodical Political Register. According to Cohen and Ross, and accepted by the OED, this is the origin of the figurative meaning of red herring. The Oxford English Dictionary makes no connection with Nashe's quote and the figurative meaning of red herring to distract from the intended target, only in the literal sense of a hunting practice to draw dogs toward a scent. Although the hound used in the test stopped to eat the fish and lost the fugitive's scent temporarily, it eventually backtracked and located the target, resulting in the myth being classified by the show as "Busted". == See also ==