"Rubber Room"

[Jesse Sheidlower]

On Wed, Mar 01, 2006 at 12:53:26PM -0800, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
> On Mar 1, 2006, at 8:21 AM, Jesse Sheidlower wrote:
>
> >Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
> >>
> >>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, that's not my interpretation--if I saw something like one's
> >office being referred to as a "rubber room", my assumption would
> >be not that it _makes_ you crazy, but that it _reflects_ your
> >craziness: I am crazy, therefore I work in a rubber room.
>
> i said that because this interpretation was explicit in one of
> barry's quotes.

Oops. Of course you're right.

/me crawls off to learn how to read

Jesse Sheidlower
OED

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org