awe-droppers strike again - stocking horse

[Damien Hall]

Tom posted this:

> stalking horse
> PRONUNCIATION:
> (STAH-king HORS)
> MEANING:
> noun:
> 1. Something used to mask the true purpose.
> 2. A candidate put forward in an election to draw votes from another or to
> conceal another's potential candidacy.

I'm going to leave aside both the phonological variables pointed out here -
we know what the reaction to any sort of questioning or debate about those
will be.

No, what I wrote to say was that (AFAIK at least) _stalking horse_ doesn't
have definition 1 above; not in BrE, at least, and I thought not in AmE
either. Surely 'something used to mask the true purpose' is a _Trojan_
horse? Or is there really a dialectal difference here?

Damien

--
Damien Hall

University of York
Department of Language and Linguistic Science
Heslington
YORK
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