straight [ME] The word straight is the old past form of Old English stretch, and originally meant ‘extended at full length’. The sense relating to an alcoholic drink, ‘undiluted’, is the American equivalent of *neat and dates from the middle of the 19th century. The straight and narrow is the honest and morally acceptable way of living. The straight and narrow path [M19th] arose through a misunderstanding of the meaning of a word in this passage from the Gospel of Matthew: ‘Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it’. Strait [ME] here simply means ‘narrow’, from the same source as *strict, a sense which only really survives today in the noun meaning ‘a narrow passage of water connecting two seas’, as in the Straits of Gibraltar. The confusion probably came about because crooked (see crook), the opposite of straight, had long been used to mean ‘dishonest’.