[Ads-l] straw-horse argument (was Re: "man" avoidance)

[ADSGarson O'Toole]

Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> JIm Acosta, CNN:
> "But isn't that a bit of a strawhorse argument?"

“Straw horses” was employed by a judge in 1974 to refer to flawed
arguments that the judge was able to refute. This usage did not
correspond to the definition of “straw man argument”. But I think it
provided a partial match. Follow the link to see the full article.

Date: March 29, 1974
Newspaper: The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper Location: Spokane, Washington
Article: Judge Cites Pros, Cons
Quote Page 12, Column 1
Database: Newspapers.com
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/104535043/straw-horse-argument/

[Begin excerpt]
Speaking to about 300 persons, he set up what he called "straw
horses", or arguments advanced in favor of the death penalty.
[End excerpt]

In 1986 the phrase “straw-horse argument” appeared in a letter
published in the San Francisco Chronicle. The phrase apparently meant
“weak argument”.

Date: December 24, 1986
Newspaper: San Francisco Chronicle
Newspaper Location: San Francisco, California
Section: Letters To the Editor
Letter title: South Africa Future
Letter From: Robert Landon of Palo Alto
Quote Page 26, Column 1
Database: GenealogyBank

[Begin excerpt - double check for OCR errors]
Joanna Burroughs letter of December 19 in rebuttal to South African
Doryn Pote's comment of December 16 is a classic example of the type
of straw-horse argument which radio's legendary Baron Munchausen
delighted to demolish with the query "vas you dere, Charley?"
[End excerpt]

Here are a few more instances.

Date: June 2002
Volume 9, Number 2
Article: The Nine Lives of the Dynamic Unconscious
Author: Jerome Kroll
Journal: Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Start Page 159
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/44106/summary

[Begin excerpt]
With the compelling evidence from psychology and neuroscience that all
memory is a reconstruction, I do not think that any contemporary
psychodynamicist makes a case for fully formed repressed memories, nor
is this notion essential to a theory of a dynamic unconscious. O'Brien
and Jureidini invoke Occam's razor by invoking a straw horse argument.
Their description of the action of subpersonal parts doing sufficient
specific cuing sounds suspiciously like the work done in the dynamic
unconscious.
[End excerpt]

Date: July 21, 2005
>From Stephen P. Harris
Subject: compiling flpsed under Cygwin
https://sourceware.org/pipermail/cygwin-xfree/2005-July.txt

[Begin excerpt]
SH: You people have been beating on a dead strawhorse argument by
harping on whether I use Xfree or Xorg. That choice has not prevented
other Linux originated programs (Xemacs) from compiling on my computer
so it points to the libX11.dll.a answer.
[End excerpt]

In the citation below "straw-man" was deliberately changed to "straw-horse".

Website: HuffPost
Date: May 28, 2009 (Updated May 25, 2011)
Article: Traditional Marriage and the Straw-Horse Argument
Author: Jane Minogue, Contributor
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/traditional-marriage-and_b_191423

[Begin excerpt]
"If we change traditional marriage, it's a slippery slope," said the
man at the table next to me at the Cheesecake Factory. "Soon we'll
have people marrying animals." Ah, the straw-man or what I dub the
straw-horse argument. That is, if we change traditional marriage
between one man and one woman, suddenly it's the end of civilization
as we know it and bestiality rules.
[End excerpt]

Garson

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