Red herring

A red herring is something that misleads or distracts from a relevant or important issue. It may be either a logical fallacy or a literary device that leads readers or audiences towards a false conclusion. A red herring might be intentionally used, such as in mystery fiction or as part of rhetorical strategies (e.g. in politics), or it could be inadvertently used during argumentation.

The origin of the expression is not known. Conventional wisdom has long supposed it to be the use of a kipper (a strong-smelling smoked fish) to train hounds to follow a scent, or to divert them from the correct route when hunting; however, modern linguistic research suggests that the term was probably invented in 1807 by English polemicist William Cobbett, referring to one occasion on which he had supposedly used a kipper to divert hounds from chasing a hare, and was never an actual practice of hunters. The phrase was later borrowed to provide a formal name for the logical fallacy and literary device.

Red herring (disambiguation)

A red herring is a figurative expression referring to a logical fallacy in which a clue or piece of information is or is intended to be misleading, or distracting from the actual question.

Red herring may also refer to:

Kipper

A kipper is a whole herring, a small, oily fish, that has been split in butterfly fashion from tail to head along the dorsal ridge, gutted, salted or pickled, and cold-smoked over smouldering woodchips (typically oak).

In the United Kingdom, Isle of Man, Japan, and a minority of North American regions they are often eaten for breakfast. They are also popular in Ireland. In Great Britain, kippers, along with other preserved smoked or salted fish such as the bloater and buckling, were also once commonly enjoyed as a high tea or supper treat, most popularly with inland and urban working-class populations before World War II.

Terminology

The English philologist and ethnographer Walter William Skeat derives the word from the Old English kippian, to spawn. The word has various possible parallels, such as Icelandic kippa which means "to pull, snatch" and the Germanic word kippen which means "to tilt, to incline". Similarly, the Middle English kipe denotes a basket used to catch fish. Another theory traces the word kipper to the kip, or small beak, that male salmon develop during the breeding season.

OL

OL may refer to:

Langues d'oïl

The langues d'oïl (/ˈwiːl/ French: [lɑ̃ɡᵊdɔjl]), or oïl languages (also in French: langues d'oui [lɑ̃ɡᵊdwi]), are a dialect continuum that includes standard French and its closest autochthonous relatives spoken today in the northern half of France, southern Belgium, and the Channel Islands. They belong to the larger Gallo-Romance languages, which also cover most of east-central (Arpitania) and southern France (Occitania), northern Italy and eastern Spain (Catalan Countries), although some linguists place Catalan into the Ibero-Romance grouping instead.

Linguists divide the Romance languages of France, and especially of Medieval France, into three geographical subgroups: Langues d'oïl and occitan, named after their words for 'yes' (oïl, òc), and Franco-Provençal (Arpitan), which is considered transitional.

Meanings and disambiguation

Langue d'oïl (in the singular), Oïl dialects and Oïl languages (in the plural) designate the ancient northern Gallo-Romance languages as well as their modern-day descendants. They share many linguistic features, a prominent one being the word oïl for yes. (Oc was and still is the southern word for yes, hence the langue d'oc or Occitan languages). The most widely spoken modern Oïl language is French (oïl was pronounced [o.il] or [o.i], which has become [wi], in modern French oui).

Loening OL

The Loening OL, also known as the Loening Amphibian, was an American two-seat amphibious biplane built by Loening for the United States Army Air Corps and the United States Navy.

Design

First flown in 1923, the OL was a high-performance amphibian with a large single hull and stabilising floats fitted underneath each lower wing. The landing gear was retractable by use of a hand-crank in the cockpit, and the plane was equipped with a tailskid for operations on land. It had a tandem open cockpit for a crew of two. The aircraft could be flown from either cockpit, with a wheel control in the forward cockpit and a removable stick control in the rear. Navigation and engine instruments were located in the forward cockpit.

The hull was built of Duralumin on a wooden frame, with five watertight compartments connected through a selector switch to a bilge pump in the rear cockpit. Plugs in the bottom of each compartment permitted drainage on the ground. The fuselage was constructed on top of the hull. The aircraft was strength-tested at Columbia University.