In the last two weeks, I've been in a number of meetings at work where the phrase "straw dog" has been used. As in, "I'm putting this up on the whiteboard as a straw dog. I'd like your feedback."
I have never heard this phrase before. "Straw man", yes. "Straw dog", no.
I wondered if it might be a Canadian-ism. So, I asked my Canadian girlfriend. She looked at me blankly when I asked her. "I've never even heard of 'straw man' .. you and your weird business lingo." Clearly not. Though now that she knows about it, I'm starting a pool about the title of her next play.
I then turned to Google. Three very helpful posts:
Both Jon over at Sprachgefühl and Benjamin at Language Log discuss the use of "Straw Dog" by US Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) in characterising the current US debate over an immigration bill.
"I think that's a straw dog, to be very honest with you, this argument of amnesty. The debate is misfocused in some ways when the word 'amnesty' becomes the hot button, nomenclature versus the more substantive question."
Jon calls the construct "awkward, confusing and unnecessary" which I agree with. Benjamin provides a more detailed analysis, discussing the connection to the movie Straw Dogs, the title of it taken from a passage in the Tao Te Ching. Benjamin points us to LanguageHat where a discussion of the linguistic origin of the phrase is going on.
I also discovered four definitions of Straw Dog at the Urban Dictionary. All variants on the same thing. Wikipedia lists both "straw man" and "straw dog" in an entry on the logical fallacy of disambiguation, a rhetorical device to misrepresent an opponent's position.
So the rhetorical definition is quite different than its use in the context of my recent meetings. Interesting. I'll have to ask my colleagues where they first heard the phrase. I still think there is some kind of regionalism here.
Photo from http://www-personal.umich.edu/~lilyth/strawman.html
Tags: language, strawman, strawdog, rhetorical fallacies
