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Diana left Bob when she met her current husband, Jim. Long before she met Bob, he and their hostess, Diana, had been engaged to be married. Their tardiness was due to Elsie’s procrastination. Have you ever been duped by a red herring? Share in the comments section.īob and Elsie arrived at their hosts’ home late for the dinner party. Sometimes it's okay for the red herring to be the actual right track, as long as your herring isn't a three-day-old herring that's stinking to high heaven and making your readers sick. Rowling became reader-savvy as a result, and in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Harry's suspicions that Draco Malfoy and Professor Snape are involved in the evildoing are actually proven right in the end. This information would destroy her career if it got out, so she chooses to keep mum, even though she has an alibi for the murder.Īs much as you want to avoid the obvious red herring, highly well-read individuals may be so genre savvy that they can identify a red herring as soon as it's introduced in the story. However, when Elle goes to see Brooke on a solo prison visit, Brooke (a commercial fitness guru) reveals that on the day of the murder, she was having liposuction. She can't give an alibi, and her stepdaughter has told an eyewitness account of Brooke standing over the dead body with gun in hand, so it looks pretty bad for Brooke.
Red herring full#
LOST is full of them, The Killing is a study in them, Agatha Christie was the queen of them in the mystery genre, and the Harry Potter series sees every possible red herring/not red herring combination there is.īut how do you create a good red herring?Ī good red herring should weave easily into the details of the story. For example, in Legally Blonde, Reese Witherspoon's character Elle Woods is working a trial defending Brooke Wyndham, who is accused of killing her husband. Red herrings are all over the place in literature and film. Examples of Red Herrings in Film and Literature When the dog followed the fish scent, the dog had followed a red herring (or sardines trainers probably weren't too picky). Since fish have a distinct and powerful odor, they were sometimes used to train the dogs to stick to the scent they were tracking when their doggie instincts were telling them that something else smells much more interesting. Usually when a dog was tracking a scent, it wasn't the only scent competing for the dog's attention. The term has its origins in the training for hunting dogs.
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What is a red herring? Here's a good working definition:Ī red herring is a clue that takes the reader and/or characters in the wrong direction. Red herrings are staples of the mystery and suspense genres, but they also can pop up in myriad other works and genres. This will help to understand what empirical findings are suitable to derive predictions on the future sustainability of HCE.Photo by Nicolas Alejandro (creative commons).
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In doing so we distinguish four different versions of the red herring hypothesis and derive the logical connections between them. In this paper, we present a critical survey of the empirical literature of the past 20 years on this topic and draw some preliminary conclusions regarding the policy question mentioned above. In light of the imminent population ageing in many of these countries it is still being discussed whether unfunded social health insurance systems will be sustainable, in particular as long as they promise to provide universal and unlimited access to medical care including the latest advances. This hypothesis has spurned a large and still growing literature on the causes and consequences of growing HCE in OECD countries, but the results of empirical studies have been rather mixed. 20 years ago, Zweifel, Felder and Meier (1999) established the by now famous “red-herring” hypothesis, according to which population ageing does not lead to an increase in per capita health care expenditures (HCE) because the observed positive correlation between age and health care expenditures (HCE) in cross-sectional data is exclusively due to the facts that mortality rises with age and a large share of HCE is caused by proximity to death.
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