Are "strait laced" and "straight laced" synonymous?
"Strait," as in Strait of Magellan, straitjacket or dire straits means narrow or confined while "straight" means exactly what one would think it to mean. All my dress shoes are laced straight across from eyelet to eyelet but not tightly! It would seem that these usages are not at all related.
My etymological dictionary doesn't acknowledge "straight laced" at all while the Allen Edmonds shoe website does--as a technique for tying shoes. Does strait-laced mean straight-laced?
I've been informed that this topic has been addressed in the past, so I went to that thread and it seemed that those who posted didn't seem to grasp the point that the phrases are unrelated to each other.
My thanks to Andrew for giving my post a much more graceful ending!
