dummy vs straw man

dummy

noun
  • A person who is the mere tool of another; a man of straw. 

  • A newborn animal that is indifferent to stimulus and does not voluntarily move. 

  • A player whose hand is shown and is to be played from by another player. 

  • A stupid person. 

  • A deliberately nonfunctional device or tool used in place of a functional one. 

  • Something constructed with the size and form of a human, to be used in place of a person. 

  • A figure of a person or animal used by a ventriloquist; a puppet. 

  • A "dummy teat"; a plastic or rubber teat used to soothe or comfort a baby; a pacifier. 

  • A word serving only to make a construction grammatical. 

  • An unused parameter or value. 

  • A feigned pass or kick or play in order to deceive an opponent. 

  • A bodily gesture meant to fool an opposing player; a feint. 

adv
  • Extremely. 

verb
  • To feint. 

  • To make a mock-up or prototype version of something, without some or all off its intended functionality. 

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 dummy and straw man occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )