straw man
- noun
- /strɔː mæn/
:
espantapájaros
- The children built a straw man to decorate the garden and frighten off unwanted birds.
Examples
-
That old straw man.
Blog text (28) -
Farmers use a straw man in the field to keep the birds away from the crops.
-
During harvest time, they put up a straw man dressed in old clothes to scare off any animals.
Synonyms
54
1.8
A thing that looks like a person to keep birds away from fields
1
7.6
A figure made of straw placed in fields to scare birds away
A thing that people put in fields to keep birds away from crops
A thing like a human figure placed in fields to frighten birds from crops
Surface Forms
Morphology
straw + man
The literal constituents 'straw' + 'man' yield a concrete image (a man made of straw) rather than the abstract notion of a misrepresented argument, so the exact rhetorical sense is not directly derivable from the parts. However, the metaphor (something insubstantial set up to be knocked down) can be inferred by learners with some exposure to argumentative contexts and many languages have a similar idiom, making it partially but not fully predictable to a B1 learner.
Etymology
Straw man is a simple figure made of straw and old clothes that farmers put in fields to scare birds. That's why the phrase can mean the object used 'to scare away birds'.