drinking-straw
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Forms: form: drinking-straws
Senses: examples: text: 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.
ref: 1894 November 5, “Hallowe’en Party”, in College Life, volume VII, number 7, Emporia, Kan.: College of Emporia, page 53, column 2:
text: 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.
ref: 1911 January 9, The Muscatine Journal, number 7, Muscatine, Ia., page 3, column 5:
text: Drinking-straws, Receptacle for dispensing.
ref: 1911 October, Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office, volume CLXXI, Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, page xxi, column 2:
text: 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.
ref: 1923, Patents for Inventions. Abridgments of Specifications, volume 5, page 138:
text: drinking-straw 423 […] 7 the beaker with the drinking-straws
ref: 1937, The English Duden: Picture Vocabularies in English with English and German Indices, pages 46 and 454:
text: 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.
ref: 1947, Annual Report of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, page 24:
text: She turned her mind to “what instead?” and hit on drinking-straws as substitutes for flame-makers.
ref: 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:
text: Each team needs a separate room, 60 pins and 60 plastic drinking-straws.
ref: 1977 December 22, Tim Eiloart, “For enterprising spirits”, in New Scientist, volume 76, number 1083, page 813, column 2:
text: 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.
ref: 1984, Peter Reading, C, London: Secker & Warburg, →ISBN, page 53:
text: 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.
ref: 1988, Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye, London: Bloomsbury Publishing, published 1989, →ISBN, pages 45, 161, and 348:
text: 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.
ref: 1997 February 7, The Daily Telegraph, number 44,054, page 43, column 4:
text: 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.
ref: 1997 March 16, Barry Wigmore, “I Work or I Die”, in Sunday Mirror, page 20:
text: 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.
ref: 1997 October 29, Christopher Morley, “Birthday warms the heart”, in The Birmingham Post, number 43,033, page 16:
text: Eleven is also the number of: […] recorded accidents in UK homes in 1994 involving drinking-straws.
ref: 1997 December 11, “Numbers”, in Eye on Thursday (The Independent), page 9:
text: 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.
ref: 1998 March 12, Tom Kemp, “These boys — they’re a riot”, in The Daily Telegraph, number 44,394, page 21:
text: 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.
ref: 2000 February 13, Terry Marotta, “Memorable Valentine’s Days”, in Record-Journal, 33rd year, number 44, Meriden, Conn., page F5:
text: 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.
ref: 2000 November 4, Susannah Herbert, “Save the front page”, in The Daily Telegraph, number 45,222, section “arts&books”, page A1, column 3:
text: Sophie Dahl pushed back the barriers of fashion modelling by not resembling a teak-stained drinking-straw.
ref: 2001 May 27, Giles Smith, “Giles Smith on Television”, in The Sunday Telegraph Magazine, page 61:
text: 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.
ref: 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:
text: Buckingham is the Party Palace! They should get their crowns fitted with beer-cozies and those crazy drinking-straws.
ref: 2003 May 3, Cintra Wilson, “Drunen royals and a sanitized Hillary”, in Ottawa Citizen, page K11, column 2:
text: In one, a boy wanted to fulfill his dreams, but he happened to be a drinking-straw living in a Sizzler in Detroit.
ref: 2003 September 3, Kathleen Flynn, “Pros Have Supporting Roles in Scriptwriting Sessions”, in Los Angeles Times, page B2:
text: A drinking-straw snakes up and out of the pack and ends in a hands-free valve.
ref: 2004 August 21, “The 50 Best Buys”, in The Information (The Independent), page 4:
text: 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.
ref: 2006 January 6, Gerard Gilbert, “The feast of Stephen”, in Arts & Books Review (The Independent), page 2:
text: 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.
ref: 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:
glosses: Dated form of drinking straw.