Throffer has not, however, been universally adopted; Michael R. Rhodes notes that there has been some controversy in the literature on whether to use throffer, citing a number of writers, including Lawrence A. Alexander, David Zimmerman and Daniel Lyons, who do not use the term. Some, including political scientists Deiniol Jones and Andrew Rigby, consider throffer to be synonymous with carrot and stick, an idiom which refers to the way a donkey is offered a carrot to encourage compliance, while noncompliance is punished with a stick. Other writers, while electing to use the word, consider it a poor one. For instance, literary scholar Daniel Shore calls it "a somewhat unfortunate term", while using it in his analysis of John Milton's Paradise Regained.
