dummy defense
n.— «The Enron Corp. trial opening Jan. 30 in Houston is shaping up to be the biggest test yet of the so-called idiot defense.…No chief executive “knows everything going on in his company,” Lay said in one of his speeches, so no one should expect him to take responsibility for the crimes of an executive he portrays as Enron’s chief villain. “I did not know what he was doing.”…It’s…also known as the “dummy” or “ostrich” defense.» —“Enron case big test of the ‘idiot defense’” by Greg Burns Chicago Tribune Jan. 2, 2006. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Is there such a thing as a “neutral” accent, and if so what does it sound like? And that quirk in the way southern Californians talk about freeways. They’ll say things like take the 405 and get on the 8. Why the definite article...
Floordrobe is the new word for an old habit: piling your clothes on the floor instead of putting them away. The Oxford English Dictionary recently added an entry for it, defining floordrobe as “an untidy heap of discarded clothing left on the floor...