"Rubber Room"

[Jonathon Green]

Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: "Rubber Room"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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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1938 S. Beckett _Murphy_ (1963) 116: The padded cells, known to the
wittier as the ‘quiet rooms.’ ‘rubber rooms’ or [...] ‘pads.’

JG

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