straw man
1
8.2
- noun
- /strɔː mæn/
- Jargon
:
prestanombre
- In the early 1970s, foreigners were buying real property in Mexico through testaferros, or straw men, in a very similar way to what is said to be happening in Cuba today.
Certainly comprehensive background checks prohibiting straw man purchases for firearms, bump stocks, I mean, these are modest.
- Certainly comprehensive background checks prohibiting straw man purchases for firearms, bump stocks, I mean, these are modest.
Examples
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America is just the straw man for every oppressive Middle Eastern regime.
Blog text (14) -
Certainly comprehensive background checks prohibiting straw man purchases for firearms, bump stocks, I mean, these are modest.
-
A clear case of trying to set up a "straw man" diversion.
Blog text (14) -
Or are you just a straw man I cobbled up?
Blog text (14) -
He won't take the expensive option to the meeting, or he'll take it, but only as a straw man for the cheaper option.
Blog text (14) -
What we must, I think, acknowledge is that Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman were not fighting a straw man; they were encountering an actuality they had reason to regard as devastating to their sense of themselves.
Academic text (1992) -
The criminals used a straw man to hide their activities from law enforcement.
-
He established a business in another name, acting as a straw man to disguise his identity.
-
To avoid detection, the scammer created a straw man who would take the fall for the illegal transactions.
Synonyms
5
7.9
A man who acts as the public leader while others secretly control things
1
8.9
A person used as a front to hide the real owners of something
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 may come from the idea of a person made of straw: weak and not the real owner, standing in place of someone else. That's why it means 'a front' or a person used 'to hide the true owner'.