Red herring
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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A red herring is a clue which is intended to be misleading, or distracting from the actual issue. For example, in mystery fiction, where the identity of a criminal is being sought, an innocent party may be purposefully cast in a guilty light by the author through the employment of deceptive clues, false emphasis, "loaded" words or other descriptive tricks of the trade. The reader's suspicions are thus misdirected, allowing the true culprit to go (temporarily at least) undetected. A false protagonist is another example of a red herring.
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See also
- And Then There Were None
- Chekhov's gun
- Chewbacca defense
- Five Red Herrings
- Foreshadowing
- Ignoratio elenchi
- Judgmental language
- Plot twist
- Red herring prospectus
- Twelve Red Herrings
- The Killing
Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Red herring" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on original research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.
