A reader, Robert Andrews, heard Sir Ed Davey on Today say that the NHS was ‘in a dire strait’. Surely you can’t be in just one strait, dire or not, Mr Andrews suggested. Well, I know sorrows come not single spies but in battalions, but some straits are served one at a time. The Torres Strait is an example. In 2013, Australia found small boats crossing the 93 miles of its narrowest point, but detected only ten asylum-seekers.

The deep water of the Lombok Strait off the coast of Bali separates two different systems of fauna: Bali has Asian creatures such as civets and woodpeckers; Lombok has Australian porcupines and white cockatoos. So it goes on: one strait at a time. Even the Strait of Dover and the Strait of Gibraltar are accorded the singular, though I, like Mr Andrews, would naturally speak of them as straits.

A strait is something narrow, deriving, via French, from Latin strictus, the past participle of stringere, ‘to tighten’. But language, like maritime waters, enjoys confused currents, and the phrase strait and narrow is often given as straight and narrow, even though its origin lies in the 1611 translation of the Bible: ‘Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life, and few there be that finde it’ (Matthew 7:14). The phrase is now inextricably confused with going straight. Straight is unrelated to strait in origin. Straight comes from the archaic past participle of the stretch. So, just as strait takes its sense from a word meaning ‘tightened’, straight comes from a word meaning ‘stretched’. To be in dire straits is an idiom that looks not to choppy waters, but to straitened circumstances. I don’t think dire straits has been reinforced by a quotation or book title. Since 1977 Dire Straits has been familiar as a rock band. A parallel phrase is Dire Sisters, with a more particular reference, to the Furies, in Latin the Dirae, in Greek the Erinyes, born, according to Hesiod, from the blood that fell to earth from the castration of Uranus. We may all have difficult childhoods in one way or another, but theirs sounds dire indeed.