The phrase "strained argument" is a correct and common usage in written English.
It means an argument that is unconvincing or forced. For example: "The lawyer made a strained argument that his client was not guilty."
What I do or refrain from doing doesn't depend on my or anyone else's having beliefs of that sort at all, unless you want to argue — and it would be a strained argument, to say the least — that everyone who walks down the street is doing so in the grip of some theoretical conviction.
Spandan made the strained argument that chained CPI is not a benefit cut, since Social Security benefits will continue to grow with a cost-of-living adjustment COLAA) under the change.
None of the strained arguments made against gay marriage have any validity.
Re "Holding Mr. Rove in Contempt" (editorial, Sept. 17), about the firings of United States attorneys and Karl Rove's defiance of a Congressional subpoena to testify about them: In a well-reasoned decision, Judge John D. Bates of United States District Court rejected the administration's strained arguments favoring executive supremacy.
However, it should also be understood that rather than hearing strained legal arguments that it has "forfeited" a right to enrichment, Iran has a need – as a matter of pride and dignity – to hear that under the non-proliferation treaty it has a right to enrich for peaceful purposes just as it has a duty to refrain from making a nuclear weapon.
The N.H.L., in the person of Brendan Shanahan, its well-meaning but oblivious disciplinarian, fined Weber a ridiculous pittance of twenty-five hundred dolland, and insisted on engaging in increasingly strained and pedantic arguments about the mystery of intention, in which violence is parsed out and punished depending on whether or not the violent act is deemed a "hockey play".
But sadly, the case also highlights the truly strained and hollow arguments that an Attorney General dedicated to defending discrimination has to muster in court, particularly after the Supreme Court's recent decisions.
The states "retain the dignity, though not the full authority, of sovereignty," he writes.Jack Rakove, an historian at Stanford University and the author of "Original Meanings" (Knopf, $35), a Pulitzer-prize-winning account of the drafting of the constitution, dismisses Justice Kennedy's historical argument as "strained, even silly".
Even in the relatively progressive confines of Atlanta, where I had college friends who were natives and where there was an abundance of Yankees in southeastern branch offices, my presence at a social gathering could cause some strained questions or an argument or, worst of all, an attempt to enlighten me about "the Negro" with what I came to think of as yard-sale anthropology.
My money is on a strained larynx after a heated argument about Australia's stance on same-sex marriage.
In a 30-page document filed with Federal District Court in Washington, the Justice Department and the states characterized Microsoft's arguments as a strained effort at knocking down legal "straw men".
