What does it mean to be in dire straits?

A reader, Robert Andrews, heard Sir Ed Davey on Today say that the NHS was ‘in a dire strait’. Surely you can’t be in just one strait, dire or not, Mr Andrews suggested. Well, I know sorrows come not single spies but in battalions, but some straits are served one at a time. The Torres Strait is an example. In 2013, Australia found small boats crossing the 93 miles of its narrowest point, but detected only ten asylum-seekers.

The deep water of the Lombok Strait off the coast of Bali separates two different systems of fauna: Bali has Asian creatures such as civets and woodpeckers; Lombok has Australian porcupines and white cockatoos. So it goes on: one strait at a time. Even the Strait of Dover and the Strait of Gibraltar are accorded the singular, though I, like Mr Andrews, would naturally speak of them as straits.

A strait is something narrow, deriving, via French, from Latin strictus, the past participle of stringere, ‘to tighten’.