How to Use straw man in a Sentence
straw man
noun-
That kept their favorite straw man alive to take more hits.
—Sabrina Eaton, cleveland, 14 Apr. 2021
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Senator Brown’s $300 per month tax cut is a straw man in more ways than one.
—Norbert Michel, Forbes, 3 Nov. 2021
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The book has the confounding idea of rebelling against recipes as a sort of villainous straw man.
—Wired, 1 Aug. 2022
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Part of it is human nature, and because there isn't a white straw man at the end of that, the villain is really the system.
—Joshua Rivera, GQ, 10 May 2018
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But the claim is a straw man: there is no epidemic of pandemic denial.
—Jacob Hale Russell, STAT, 23 Dec. 2020
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The argument is that the demonstration was built on a big straw man fallacy.
—Vera Bergengruen/buenos Aires, TIME, 23 May 2024
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Notably, Villanueva appears to have set up a straw man here.
—Oliver Darcy, CNN, 26 Apr. 2022
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Campillo is much more interested in the push and pull of each discussion, and in making sure there are no straw men to root against.
—David Sims, The Atlantic, 19 Oct. 2017
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This is a straw man argument of the sort Williams delights in, in his Sun platform on the editorial pages.
—Reader Commentary, Baltimore Sun, 10 May 2024
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And nearly three hours is a long time to spend with only one real person, who keeps getting attacked by straw men.
—Helen Shaw, The New Yorker, 26 June 2023
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But one of the report's authors suggested Koonin is creating a straw man.
—Alaska Dispatch News, 3 Nov. 2017
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The issue has produced a lot of straw men, largely owing to a revenue and salary model that differs a great deal from most American sports.
—Eliott C. McLaughlin, CNN, 8 July 2019
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Evison says book banning is a political straw man, and the stakes are much higher than just the books being targeted.
—Barbara Vandenburgh, USA TODAY, 16 Sep. 2022
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The Utah Senator set up the straw man that the President’s lawyers said an impeachable act must also be a criminal offense.
—The Editorial Board, WSJ, 5 Feb. 2020
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One piece of advice comes from Natarajan: Rebut the strongest, and not the weakest, version of an opposing argument; steel man, don’t straw man.
—Bo Seo, The Atlantic, 1 June 2022
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But again, that's a straw man—no one was arguing that backcountry streams were the main source of Giardia infections.
—Christie Wilcox, Discover Magazine, 8 Feb. 2018
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The Axe debuted on the eve of a baseball game between the universities in 1899, when Stanford students used it to decapitate a straw man adorned in Cal blue and gold.
—Rusty Simmons, SFChronicle.com, 26 Nov. 2020
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The attempt to shut down all such conversations in the name of a broad, blurred, straw man version of Critical Race Theory does not serve the nation’s best interests.
—Peter Greene, Forbes, 23 June 2021
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Most importantly, this volume reveals that Coates’ critics to have been attacking a straw man all along.
—Ismail Muhammad, New Republic, 26 Oct. 2017
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Too often, a debate can turn into trading arguments about whose straw man fell down the slippery slope onto Occam’s razor the most.
—Eric Ravenscraft, Wired, 29 Sep. 2020
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Indeed, the series opens with a flashback of Suleiman as a child rather than any introduction to Ryan, and there’s obvious care taken to make the Muslim characters more than stereotypes or straw men.
—Karen Han, Vox, 31 Aug. 2018
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Once again those with a global agenda have created a straw man by misrepresenting the position of their critics.
—Phil Plait, Discover Magazine, 31 May 2011
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Shivaun Raff believes that some of search neutrality’s critics were simply attacking a straw man.
—Adi Robertson, The Verge, 6 Dec. 2018
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Richard Warshak, a leading proponent of parental alienation theory, has written that many critics misunderstand the theory or create a straw man to dismiss it.
—Kathryn Joyce, Longreads, 10 Aug. 2020
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Our suspicion is that the many gravity modellers from around the world evaluated a nonsensical Brexit straw man during the referendum, in order to oppose it.
—The Economist, 21 Sep. 2017
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That both consider realism’s antecedents and insights without using some variant of liberalism as a straw man is equally impressive.
—Emma Ashford, Foreign Affairs, 6 Sep. 2022
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But that straw man ignores the text of modern bills and laws, which include exceptions for emergencies and scheduling.
—Gleb Tsipursky, Washington Post, 21 Jan. 2026
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This will enable the type of straw man circumstances to go underground and work at a global scale.
—Lance Eliot, Forbes.com, 30 July 2025
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The true villain is Zac, who is really just a straw man for the Mormon church.
—Olivia Crandall, Vulture, 16 May 2025
Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'straw man.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
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