Dictionary
Words, grammatical forms and meanings linked to the ontology.
drinking-straw en · NOUN
Meanings
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(alt-of, dated) Dated form of drinking straw.
Drinking-straws, Receptacle for dispensing.
1911 October, Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office, volume CLXXI, Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, page xxi, column 2:With dogged determination, sucking air through a contraption like a restricted drinking-straw, he built up his lung-power — a few seconds, then minutes, now he can go hours without the ventilator.
1997 March 16, Barry Wigmore, “I Work or I Die”, in Sunday Mirror, page 20:The strip, which was key, resembled what a kid makes with the paper his drinking-straw comes in, folding it into a bunchy little caterpillar on which he then releases water, drop by drop, to see it expand and take on movement.
2000 February 13, Terry Marotta, “Memorable Valentine’s Days”, in Record-Journal, 33rd year, number 44, Meriden, Conn., page F5:A drinking-straw snakes up and out of the pack and ends in a hands-free valve.
2004 August 21, “The 50 Best Buys”, in The Information (The Independent), page 4:Apples, liquid, fresh and sweet, were present too, and their little brown jug with its drinking-straws was pleasantly patronized in its quaintly retired corner.
1894 November 5, “Hallowe’en Party”, in College Life, volume VII, number 7, Emporia, Kan.: College of Emporia, page 53, column 2:Both books pushed realism so far that it touched on surrealism, and both freeze-framed the present moment, compensating for their plotlessness by chronicling in loving detail the minutiae of late-20th-century life — the way the light falls on the handrail of a moving escalator, the design flaws of drinking-straws that, annoyingly, float instead of standing upright.
2000 November 4, Susannah Herbert, “Save the front page”, in The Daily Telegraph, number 45,222, section “arts&books”, page A1, column 3:She turned her mind to “what instead?” and hit on drinking-straws as substitutes for flame-makers.
1948, Alex [Faickney] Osborn, Your Creative Power: How to Use Imagination, New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner’s Sons; London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, Ltd., pages 201–202:In one, a boy wanted to fulfill his dreams, but he happened to be a drinking-straw living in a Sizzler in Detroit.
2003 September 3, Kathleen Flynn, “Pros Have Supporting Roles in Scriptwriting Sessions”, in Los Angeles Times, page B2:Laura, the ever so politically correct neighbour, feels that single-parent Gordon should join the local “Mums and Toddlers” group when she notices Daniel using his drinking-straw as a gun.
1997 February 7, The Daily Telegraph, number 44,054, page 43, column 4:Problems investigated for manufacturing industries included, among many others, the deterioration of wax used for the impregnation of drinking-straws, the identification of a special lubricant for a crankshaft-grinding machine, comparison of dry-cleaning solvents, an explosion in a degreasing plant, an explosion in a railway signal lamp, fire hazard in disinfection of aircraft cabins, and deterioration of hydraulic hoses in aircraft.
1947, Annual Report of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, page 24:They were blowing paper pellets at each other through their drinking-straws, stuffing handfuls of crushed ice down the backs of each other’s shirts and dropping chips dipped in tomato ketchup on the floor.
1998 March 12, Tom Kemp, “These boys — they’re a riot”, in The Daily Telegraph, number 44,394, page 21:Buckingham is the Party Palace! They should get their crowns fitted with beer-cozies and those crazy drinking-straws.
2003 May 3, Cintra Wilson, “Drunen royals and a sanitized Hillary”, in Ottawa Citizen, page K11, column 2:We’re issued small bottles of milk which we drink through straws stuck in through a hole in the cardboard bottle tops. These are my first drinking-straws, and they amaze me. […] We make complicated floral patterns with a compass, we glue odd substances to cardboard backings: feathers, sequins, pieces of macaroni garishly dyed, lengths of drinking-straw. […] Apart from the still lifes, what I’m showing is mostly figurative, although there are a couple of constructions made from drinking-straws and uncooked macaroni, and one called Silver Paper.
1988, Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye, London: Bloomsbury Publishing, published 1989, →ISBN, pages 45, 161, and 348:The above-described mechanism may be employed only for making bags; preferably, however, this mechanism is associated with the mechanism, comprising a drum 69, for charging each bag with cigarettes, matches, drinking-straws, or the like, and for closing the mouth of the bag.
1923, Patents for Inventions. Abridgments of Specifications, volume 5, page 138:Make your own marking tools (pencils and pens that have been produced industrially are not allowed), for instance it is possible to use drinking-straws or stirrers cut into quill pens.
2011, Marco Frascari, Eleven Exercises in the Art of Architectural Drawing: Slow Food for the Architect’s Imagination, London; New York, N.Y.: Routledge, →ISBN, page 34:If you use one of those bendy drinking-straws – with the shorter end stuck in a glass held above another glass – sucking on the lower end of the straw sets up a stream of fizzy liquid flowing up and out of the higher glass and into the other, in defiance of the law of gravity.
2002 September 15, Robert Matthews, “Sometimes you have to grasp at straws to keep your children amused”, in The Sunday Telegraph, number 2,153, page 35, column 1:Each team needs a separate room, 60 pins and 60 plastic drinking-straws.
1977 December 22, Tim Eiloart, “For enterprising spirits”, in New Scientist, volume 76, number 1083, page 813, column 2:The bureau of manufactures, department of commerce and labor, has a communication from an American business house which states it has been purchasing drinking-straws abroad, but would like to make purchases in the home market.
1911 January 9, The Muscatine Journal, number 7, Muscatine, Ia., page 3, column 5:Here are some of the things you’ll need if it takes place at home: bed-care utensil set (inc. denture cup, kidney basin, bed pan &c.), large sheet of plastic, rented wheelchair, box of flexible drinking-straws, one bag disposable bed pads (the incontinent will use considerably more), large size disposable diapers (several boxes), thermometer, one bottle ethyl alcohol, cotton balls, lubricant, commode, a great many spare undersheets, six wash-cloths.
1984, Peter Reading, C, London: Secker & Warburg, →ISBN, page 53:Eleven is also the number of: […] recorded accidents in UK homes in 1994 involving drinking-straws.
1997 December 11, “Numbers”, in Eye on Thursday (The Independent), page 9:There’s no sign of the famous drinking-straw he carries to fiddle with, but it’s probably as well that he doesn’t smoke.
2006 January 6, Gerard Gilbert, “The feast of Stephen”, in Arts & Books Review (The Independent), page 2:Nieper’s rapt, plaintive, slightly jazz-inflected and beautifully controlled Rachmaninov Vocalise was a show-stopping highlight, but we also treasure the memory of George Caird snipping a drinking-straw progressively shorter as he played, illustrating how length governs pitch.
1997 October 29, Christopher Morley, “Birthday warms the heart”, in The Birmingham Post, number 43,033, page 16:drinking-straw 423 […] 7 the beaker with the drinking-straws
1937, The English Duden: Picture Vocabularies in English with English and German Indices, pages 46 and 454:Sophie Dahl pushed back the barriers of fashion modelling by not resembling a teak-stained drinking-straw.
2001 May 27, Giles Smith, “Giles Smith on Television”, in The Sunday Telegraph Magazine, page 61:
Forms