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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
Googling ‘Cat’s Pawn’ mostly brings up references to an SF novel. Nonetheless, it’s also a rare eggcorn. A ‘cat’s paw’ is a dupe or puppet of someone else. One meaning of ‘pawn’ is very similar. Examples:
Bush: is he more of a cats-pawn of his military cabal of neocons, or of his puppet-master of public opinion, Karl Rove?
www.messagesinbottles.com/JulBottles.html
Like Nasser, and recently Syria’s interior minister, he is simply a dirty cat’s pawn in the hands of the Israeli manipulators.
lonehighlander.blogspot.com/2005/10/snippets.html
Yi’s acceptance of KMakai’s basic explanatory framework hardly made him a Japanese “cat’s pawn†in the Realpolitik of the time …
world.lib.ru/k/kim_o_i/n101.shtml
“Something tells me Annabelle’s a cat’s pawn for others.
archives.eyrie.org/anime/Urusei-Yatsura/The-Ishinomaki-Years/uy.tiy.15.memories.gz
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Nice find. It initially sounded a bit ironic to me; A “cat’s paw” is a very concrete item which I wouldn’t expect to see corrupted. (A malapropism would seem more likely). But apparently the utterers of “cat’s pawn” clearly understood the notion conveyed when they first misheard “cat’s paw:” A dupe. Given that, I guess it does make sense for them to string together the elements of a cat (with it’s bad intentions) and pawn (with it’s powerlessness) to convey that very notion.
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