"Rubber Room"

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Mar 1, 2006, at 6:08 AM, Barry Popik wrote:

> Today's Wall Street Journal reports that Detroit pays some people
> to do
> nothing. They spend all day in what workers call a "rubber room."
> ...
> No OED cite for "rubber room"??
> ...
> HDAS?

the development is pretty clearly from the psychiatric-care sense (a
rubber room is one so designed that potentially violent psychiatric
patients confined in it  cannot harm themselves) to the sense of a
room that *makes* you crazy, specifically because there's nothing for
you to do in it.  so the psychiatric connection is preserved, but
reinterpreted.

arnold

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