straitjacket

plural straitjackets · alternative strait jacket · alternative strait-jacket · alternative straightjacket

1. A jacketlike garment with very long sleeves which can be secured in place, thus preventing the wearer from moving their arms; formerly often used in psychiatric hospitals to prevent patients from injuring themselves or others.

   There’s a couple of people actually wearing duct-tape straitjackets.

   1992, Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash, page 243

   Synonyms: straitwaistcoat

2. figurativelyAny situation seen as confining or restricting.

   our ever-increasing bureaucratic straitjacket of regulations

   1 more example

   [I]f we remain in one discipline, we remain in a straitjacket; an adequate theory of language evolution requires a lot of interdisciplinary work.

   2009, Michael Giffin, Quadrant, November 2009, No. 461 (Volume LIII, Number 11), Quadrant Magazine Limited, page 99

present singular third person straitjackets · participle present straitjacketing · participle past straitjacketed · past straitjacketed · alternative strait jacket · alternative strait-jacket · alternative straightjacket

1. literallytransitiveTo put someone into a straitjacket.

   What he asked himself now was,—could Miss Edge and Miss Baker, in order to get him out of the house, have set Birt onto Elizabeth, be in league with the man to break a poor old fellow down by simply driving his sad girl out of her wits? To have her straitjacketted even, muffled in a padded room?

   1948, Henry Green [pseudonym; Henry Vincent Yorke], [chapter 1], in Concluding: A Novel, New York, N.Y.: The Viking Press, published 1950, →OCLC, page 11

   Synonyms: jacket

2. broadlyfigurativelytransitiveTo restrict the freedom of someone or something, either physically or psychologically.

   she couldnʼt wait to go to college, have a career and leave her parentsʼ straitjacketed lives behind

   2019, Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other, Penguin Books (2020), page 280

   5 more examples

   Charles for five whole days in a Victorian topper and tailcoat when he practically had to be straitjacketted to get him into tails for a three-hour wedding?

   1977, Doreen Tovey, chapter 4, in The Coming of Saska (Feline Frolics; 7), Chichester, West Sussex: Summersdale Publishers, published 2007, →ISBN, page 42

   Encouraging, allowing for, and maintaining a plurality of viewpoints concerning public policy, for instance, adaptively (even though partially and incompletely) reduces the chances of a rigidly deterministic and reductionistic mindset maladaptively straitjacketting our abilities to deal with dynamic complexity and to appreciate the benefits of malleability and self-criticality in remaining open to the challenges of our environment.

   1994, Ian T[revor] King, “Politics, Economics, and Democracy”, in Explorations Beyond the Machine: A Philosophy of Social Science for the Post-Newtonian Age (Mamardashvili Series on Philosophy, Psychology and Sociology), Commack, N.Y.: Nova Science Publishers, →ISBN, part 4 (The “New” Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Politics, and Economics), page 239

   But it has not always been like this. The last time human remains hit the headlines occurred when the government-sponsored Palmer Report was published. It was deeply antagonistic to research on human remains, and recommended straitjacketing archaeological research within the same framework as medical science.

   2004 October 31, Robert Foley, “The Flores remains could have been lost to science”, in The Observer, →ISSN, archived from the original on 25 Jan 2022

   Where most primates have a respectable pair of grasping rear hands we have two changelings: long arched pads with rounded chins at one end and stumpy thumbs straight-jacketed to baby fingers at the other.

   2012, Caspar Henderson, The Book of Barely Imagined Beings, page 118

   A Labour opposition that has straitjacketed its pledges and ambitions with its fears of blowing its strongest chance in years to gain power.

   2023 August 7, Nesrine Malik, “British people are kinder and less divided than politicians give us credit for”, in The Guardian, archived from the original on 24 Feb 2024