why is it called a straw man argument
Straw man The term's origins are unclear. The usage of the term in rhetoric suggests a human figure made of straw that is easy to knock down or destroyâ€”such as a military training dummy, scarecrow, or effigy.[8] A common folk etymology is that it refers to men who stood outside courthouses with a straw in their shoe to signal their willingness to be a false witness.[9]
Political correctness The term had only scattered usage before the 1990s, usually as an ironic self-description, but entered more common usage in the United States after it was the subject of a series of articles in The New York Times.[9][10][11][12][13][14] The phrase was widely used in the debate about Allan Bloom's 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind,[4][6][15][16] and gained further currency in response to Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals (1990),[4][6][17][18] and conservative author Dinesh D'Souza's 1991 book Illiberal Education, in which he condemned what he saw as liberal efforts to advance self-victimization, multiculturalism through language, affirmative action, and changes to the content of school and university curricula.[4][5][17][19]