An Insult From Professor Faxman

By Geoffrey Pullum. I have received a letter from a person I will refer to as Professor Faxman (I’ll explain the name below). After some preliminary throat-clearing compliments about The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, he comes to his main point: Alluding to my recent paper on the passive (browsable HTML version here), he asserts: “When I looked at your article on passive loathing, I found a lot of straw-man slaying.”
Scoundrel! The Oxford English Dictionary and Webster’s Third New International Dictionary agree on the meaning of straw man (which they cross-refer to man of straw). More...