chief vs straw man

chief

noun
  • A leader or head of a group of people, organisation, etc. 

  • An informal term of address. 

  • The principal part or top of anything. 

  • An informal term of address for a Native American or First Nations man. 

  • The top part of a shield or escutcheon; more specifically, an ordinary consisting of the upper part of the field cut off by a horizontal line, generally occupying the top third. 

verb
  • To smoke cannabis. 

adj
  • Primary; principal. 

  • Intimate, friendly. 

straw man

noun
  • An innocuous person or someone of nominal or lesser importance, as a front man or straw boss. 

  • A doll or scarecrow, particularly one stuffed with straw. 

  • An insubstantial concept, idea, endeavor or argument, particularly one deliberately set up to be weakly supported, e.g. by misrepresenting an opponent's argument by broadening or narrowing the scope of a premise, so that it can be easily knocked down; especially to impugn the strength of any related or contrasted thing or idea. 

  • An outline serving as an initial proposal for a project, usually refined iteratively. 

  • Synonym of straw buyer 

verb
  • To falsely attribute an insubstantial argument (a straw man argument) to another through direct declaration or indirect implication; to put words in someone's mouth. 

How often have the words chief and straw man occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )