whipping boy
11
8.1
- noun
- /ˈwɪpɪŋ bɔɪ/
- In the office, Ryan often feels like a whipping boy for his colleagues' mistakes.
Examples
-
On the other hand, Moscow is tempted to use Pakistan as a whipping boy in its criticism of U.S. policies.
Academic text (2003) -
I could become the enemy or whipping boy of everybody!
Blog text (29) -
What am I, your whipping boy?
-
What could you say when you were a whipping boy for the whole class?
Fiction book (1996) -
The media want him to play the role of the whipping boy.
Blog text (29) -
The Democrats have used the oil industry as their private whipping boy for the last 40 years.
Blog text (4) -
They need a whipping boy.
-
But those who need a whipping boy must be careful not to flog him to death.
Academic text (2003) -
That's the real source of the problems that make you the whipping boys...
Blog text (3) -
I was everybody's whipping boy for the last 17 years, but, see, all along, I've been the man.
Synonyms
60
6.3
A person blamed or punished for other people's mistakes
1
9.9
A woman unfairly blamed or punished for other people's mistakes
How Blamed
Surface Forms
Morphology
whipping + boy
The elements 'whipping' (beating/punishment) and 'boy' (person) make it partly clear that the phrase refers to someone who is punished, so a learner could guess a punished person. However, the specific idiomatic sense—being punished or blamed as a surrogate for others' mistakes—is culturally/historically conditioned and not fully predictable from the parts alone, so full comprehension would likely require prior exposure.
Etymology
The phrase whipping boy may come from a practice in the past when a prince could not be punished, so a companion boy got the whipping instead. So today, a whipping boy means someone 'blamed or punished for the mistakes of others'.