Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A long-sleeved jacketlike garment used to bind the arms tightly against the body as a means of restraining a violent patient or prisoner.
- noun Something that restricts, hinders, or confines.
- transitive verb To restrain, restrict, or hinder by or as if by confining in a straitjacket.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A
jacket -like garment with very longsleeves which can be secured in place, thus preventing the wearer from moving his or her arms. Often used inpsychiatric hospitals to prevent patients from injuring themselves or others. - noun A
metaphor used to describe a range of situations seen as (unpleasantly?) confining or restricting. - verb literally To put someone into a
straitjacket . - verb by extension To
restrict thefreedom of, eitherphysically orpsychologically .
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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Too often, I fear, the straitjacket is what ends up coming across from the opera stage.
All that jazz Anne Midgette 2010
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He would come into a big city and hang himself upside down in a straitjacket from a skyscraper - but not just any building, usually the one that housed the major newspaper.
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I mean, it's the best kind of long-term straitjacket.
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It was not this so-called straitjacket that is the cause of today's euro crisis.
The ailing euro is part of a wider crisis. Our capitalist system is near meltdown | Will Hutton 2011
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Otherwis known as a straitjacket, she added to herself.
Baby In My Arms Harper, Madeline 1996
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Pinned to his straitjacket was a tag saying paranoid schizophrenic.
1968 Haldeman, Joe & Fields, Trinity 1984
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•Free the police and courts from the politically correct straitjacket which is stopping them from doing their jobs properly;
‘Rent A Mob’ Attack Police At BBC TV Centre « POLICE INSPECTOR BLOG Inspector Gadget 2009
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He condemned the increasing "straitjacket" of centrally imposed sentencing guidelines and said that the police were increasingly meting out justice "behind closed doors" by issuing cautions in criminal cases which would once have been placed before the courts.
Archive 2008-12-01 Not a sheep 2008
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He condemned the increasing "straitjacket" of centrally imposed sentencing guidelines and said that the police were increasingly meting out justice "behind closed doors" by issuing cautions in criminal cases which would once have been placed before the courts.
Crime and punishment in Labour Britain Not a sheep 2008
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Of course, all this is - as George Osborne put it recently - a "straitjacket" on whoever governs our country next.
An indebted nation 2008
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