useful idiot
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: Zipf frequency 4.22 in modern English
15
Scrabble Score
11
Letters
3
Syllables
9
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A Communist sympathizer in Western countries, from the perspective of the political right.
Derogatory
Example Sentences
- "L'Umanita said the Communists would give the “useful idiots” of the left-wing Socialist party the choice of merging with the Communist party or getting out."
- "During the 1930s and ’40s and ’50s, the right had derided liberal writers and editors as Communists’ “useful idiots,” unwittingly doing the Communists’ propaganda work; it looks in retrospect as if, starting in the 1970s, a lot of them—of us—became capitalists’ useful idiots."
- "But what should the Obama Cult do now? The man has turned off the switch on the "Hopenosis" and has revealed the "Change Brigade" for the useful idiots they were."
- "“President Trump should be considered to be a useful idiot and a fellow traveler, which makes him an unwitting agent of Putin,” he says."