desperate straits

A very difficult situation. The noun “strait,” usually in the plural (straits), has been used since the 1600s to mean a dilemma of some kind. One of the earliest pairings with “desperate” was in Harriet Martineau’s The History of England during the Thirty Years’ Peace (1849): “Never were Whig rulers reduced to more desperate straits.” Today the term is used both seri- ously and ironically, as in “We’re in desperate straits today—the newspaper never arrived.”