Red Herring for non-native speakers
I must confess that I don't master all words, and especially all expressions or proverbs used in English. A side-effect of speaking Dutch as my mother tongue. When I was a kid, there used to be some words which, even though I had no formal comprehension of them, I still understood what the general idea behind them was. For the Dutch readers: 'zoeven', in the context of 'just a minute ago' was such a word.
In English, things are far worse for me. Thanks to this excellent online dictionary, the amount of spelling mistakes I make should be bearable, but it doesn't help much with slang or expressions composed of a number of unrelated words. A good example is red herring. Of course, first it was me being stupid just entering 'herring' in the search box, but eventually I found out. I like the story behind the expression however much more than the dry explanation in dictionary.reference.com.
10:00:28 AM    comment []