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straight and narrow, the
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Idioms and Phrases
The honest and upright way of living, as in He led a wild life when he was young, but he's been on the straight and narrow for some years . This expression is widely though to come from confusion of straight , “not crooked,” with strait , “narrow,” owing to a misinterpretation of a passage from the New Testament: “Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life” (Matthew 7:14). The current phrase dates only from the first half of the 1800s.Advertisement
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
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