Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat:
Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.
“Strait” is an old word for the passage way between two, say, islands in the sea. Taiwan Straits, yes. The strait is necessarily narrow, which helps explain why “strait and narrow” became a set phrase.
Straight, right?
Well, you’re right. Nobody knows for sure how, over time, the populace comes to take “straight” for “strait” but the populace can do no wrong, right?
Language-wise, certainly so. It makes sense, too. After all, to the general populace, straight is a more commonplace, and, therefore, accessible.
Now, media examples:
1. strait and narrow:
Since the calamitously expensive loss of the legal fight over whether to pay airport employees what the airport commission had agreed to pay them, one might have expected the county commissioners and their ambitious county manager to carefully walk the strait and narrow. Alas, no. The seven commissioners and their professional leader cannot help themselves. Two weeks ago we learned that the county engineer, an otherwise well-trained, competent, useful, and just slightly visible professional employee of the county, had been deputized to write parking tickets along State Beach. Not only that, but the tickets Steve Berlucchi wrote began appearing in September on cars parked, not on the sand or beach grass, over which the county worries, but on the pavement facing east when they ought to have been facing west. The tickets, labeled Oak Bluffs, and signed Berlucchi, suggested that an Oak Bluffs officer had written them. Mr. Berlucchi is not an Oak Bluffs officer, as inquiries by irritated ticket recipients revealed. The tickets were dismissed.
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