straitlaced
\STREYT-leyst\ (adjective) - 1 : Wearing a garment that is tightly laced up 2 :
excessively conservative in opinion and behavior, very prudish,
priggish.
"Jackson worked in the sort of straitlaced office where the
men's cubicles were on one side of the building and the women's on the
other."
The first component of today's word was originally Middle English
streit "narrow, narrows" from Old French estreit "tight, narrow." The Old French
word was the natural descendant of Latin strictus, the past participle of
stringere "to draw tight." The spelling indicates that "strait" in compounds is
another victim of folk etymology. When "tight" replaced "strait" as an
individual word, the original was left behind in compound nouns, so speakers
began looking for a similar word to replace it in compounds, "straight" being
the logical choice. It has not been changed in "straits," as in the Straits of
Gibraltar," though it is creeping into "straitjacket." "Strait," is a distant
cousin of "stringent" and "strict" and would seem to be unrelated to
"straight."
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