Inferences and fallacies

The thirty-first entry is l’homme de paille, and the sense it carries on this page is the newest of its jobs and far from the commonest. In French the phrase belongs first to business and to the courts. Un homme de paille is the person whose name stands on a contract, a company or a bid so that whoever really acts stays out of sight, and the plainer word lying beside it is un prête-nom. That sense is in daily use: il a racheté la société par un homme de paille. Only later did the figure walk into argument, where it names the opponent nobody holds, built so that it can be knocked down. English divided the same image quite differently. « Straw man » took the argument and nothing else. « Man of straw », the older form, names a defendant with nothing worth taking, someone not worth suing. Neither will do for the nominee, and for that English changes picture altogether and says « front man ». So read homme de paille twice: once for the argument, and once for the name on the paper.