June 11, 1997

straw man

Can you please tell me the origin of the term "straw man"?

Straw man is an expression one sees rather often lately, what with the frequency of rhetorical attacks. The usual sense of straw man is 'a weak or imaginary person, object, or issue set up in order to be triumphantly refuted'. The attacking of straw men is an easy way to score points in an argument, and so they have become something of a fixture.

Another common use of straw man is 'a person whose only function is to cover the activities of another; a front'.

These senses, in this form, are first found in the late nineteenth century. The original, sixteenth-century sense of straw man is the literal 'a figure of a man stuffed with straw', in other words, 'a scarecrow'. Our figurative senses stem from the idea of 'a counterfeit', and, in the slightly different wording man of straw, are found in the seventeenth century in all senses.

In recent years we've also been collecting examples for the gender-neutral straw person and for the specific straw woman, applied to women used as subjects of easy refutation.