I little thought in 2023, when writing about dire straits, that we’d so soon be pushed into them by trouble in the Straits of Hormuz. In discussions of these on the wireless, I find that even the best-informed commentators begin by referring to this geographical feature as the Strait of Hormuz but before long fall into calling them the straits.

Insisting on the singular strait seems sterile pedantry. The Oxford English Dictionary has got the usage pretty straight: ‘When used as a geographical proper name, the word is usually plural with singular sense, e.g. the Straits of Dover, the Straits of Gibraltar.’

A pleasant piece of naval slang 100 years ago was up the Straits, meaning ‘in the Mediterranean’. A character in Pincher Martin OD (1916) says: ‘’Er commander’s a werry nice gentleman; ’e was shipmates along o’ me in th’ Duncan up the Straits six year ago.’ This was 40 years before William Golding wrote Pincher Martin. OD stood for Ordinary Seaman, lower than an Able Seaman.

The earlier novel was written by Henry Taprell Dorling (1883-1968), under the pseudonym Taffrail. (The taffrail was the aftermost portion of the poop-rail, but the word has a confused history, being derived from tafferel, originally the upper part of the flat portion of the stern above the transom. It came from a Dutch word meaning ‘table’.) In the Bible we still find strait applying to a land defile, as in the Book of Judith: ‘They hanged the head of Holofernes upon the wall, and every man took his weapons, and they went forth by bands unto the straits of the mountain.’ Strait has no etymological connection with straight. The Street called Straight in the Bible is the mile-long straight but not strait street across Damascus. A fine confusion gave us straight and narrow, which misconstrued a verse in St Matthew (7:14): ‘Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life.’ The channel between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman is not straight but, to our cost, it is strait.