straitjacket
/ˈstreɪtdʒakɪt
/(also straightjacket) Usage
noun
1A strong garment with long sleeves which can be tied together to confine the arms of a violent prisoner or mental patient.And we were taken to be strapped together in an all-in-one straitjacket....
- A quick strong jerk and the straitjacket burst up high into the air.
- It's one of the more panic-inducing screen sequences in memory: In a hospital morgue, a mental patient is trussed in a straitjacket and locked away in the airless dark of a body storage drawer.
1.1A severe restriction on freedom of action, development, or expression: the government is operating in an economic straitjacket...
- We must break through the mental straitjacket and realize that another world is possible.
- We've got the government ordering us to zip up our mental straitjackets in public.
- We have to be careful, as you would understand, putting straitjackets on either judges or counsel.
verb (straitjackets, straitjacketing, straitjacketed) [with object]
1Restrain with a straitjacket.We have been locked in seclusion, placed in restraints, chemically and physically straitjacketed, lobotomized, shocked and beaten because we protested too much....
- In terms of the film's representations of Billie, straitjacketed and screaming, she is presented metaphorically as a swaddling baby as she cries out for care.
1.1Impose severely restrictive measures on (a person or activity): the treaty should not be used as a tool to straitjacket international trade...
- His argument is simply that there is a delicate balance between being prepared, and being straightjacketed.
- Interestingly, the employees do not work in a rigid, straitjacketed fashion.
- The façade never quite resolves its identity crisis, and the rigid design straitjackets other intimations of a hidden life.
Usage
See strait-laced (usage)