How to Use straw man in a Sentence

straw man

noun
  • The book has the confounding idea of rebelling against recipes as a sort of villainous straw man.
    — Wired, 1 Aug. 2022
  • Senator Brown’s $300 per month tax cut is a straw man in more ways than one.
    — Norbert Michel, Forbes, 3 Nov. 2021
  • The argument is that the demonstration was built on a big straw man fallacy.
    — Vera Bergengruen/buenos Aires, TIME, 23 May 2024
  • 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
  • The bread debacle can seem like a straw man designed to make the whole system look pointless and unworkable.
    — Nicholas Florko, The Atlantic, 21 Oct. 2024
  • 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
  • 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
  • But one of the report's authors suggested Koonin is creating a straw man.
    — Alaska Dispatch News, 3 Nov. 2017
  • The straw man retort here is that the police have a tough and often dangerous job ensuring public safety for all of us.
    — New York Daily News Editorial Board, New York Daily News, 20 Jan. 2024
  • 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
  • Most importantly, this volume reveals that Coates’ critics to have been attacking a straw man all along.
    — Ismail Muhammad, New Republic, 26 Oct. 2017
  • Which is try to be reasonable and reasoned, try to apply logic, try to be fair, try not to straw man people on opposing sides of arguments.
    — David Frum, The Atlantic, 1 July 2026
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • Shivaun Raff believes that some of search neutrality’s critics were simply attacking a straw man.
    — Adi Robertson, The Verge, 6 Dec. 2018
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • Funneling money surreptitiously to campaigns through other donors — known as straw man donations — would violate federal campaign finance laws.
    — New York Times, 8 Feb. 2022
  • 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
  • Yet the events occurring within the Colorado bunker this season depict the real darkness that continues to permeate a society gutted and controlled by billionaires and vapid straw men.
    — Aramide Tinubu, Variety, 20 Feb. 2026
  • 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
  • But instead of rallying behind any of these causes, some of the most powerful and visible women in media and entertainment are busy using trans people as a straw man to express a nebulous fear that the word woman itself is somehow under threat.
    — Emma Specter, Vogue, 5 July 2022

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.

Last Updated: