See motte and bailey in All languages combined, or Wiktionary
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"ref": "1939, H. Lawlor, “Mote, Moat, or Motte?”, in Ulster Journal of Archaeology, 2, 208-210, p. 210:",
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"A form of argument and an informal fallacy where an arguer conflates two similar positions, one modest and easier to defend (the \"motte\") and one much more controversial (the \"bailey\"), by advancing the controversial position, but when challenged, insisting that they are only advancing the more modest position."
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Download raw JSONL data for motte and bailey meaning in English (2.6kB)
This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-11-06 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-10-02 using wiktextract (fbeafe8 and 7f03c9b). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.
If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.