I think its really weird to get bent out of shape about this stuff. I doubt seriously that the author believes that "straw-man" is "harmful." Even if one did fe

I think its really weird to get bent out of shape about this stuff. I doubt seriously that the author believes that "straw-man" is "harmful." Even if one did feel it was harmful, one would have to be dumb indeed to believe it was important on the grand list of harmful stuff. That said, its also harmless to modernize the idiom. When straw man was coined, women were much less a part of public life, and now they aren't. I don't see the problem updating the idiom to reflect a fundamentally less gendered world. Like clearly if you think "strawman" is harmless then you must also believe that "strawfigure" is just as harmless? Language changes for all kinds of reasons.