rubber room
5
8.8
- noun
- /ˈrʌbər ruːm/
- Informal
:
sala acolchada
- You were coming here expecting to find straitjackets and rubber rooms, weren't you?
- teachers in rubber room
Examples
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Students deemed too disruptive are sometimes placed in a rubber room until they can return to the classroom.
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I'll interview you in the rubber room for further details.
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I keep thinking I'm gonna wake up in a rubber room.
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I know about the "rubber rooms" in the NYC school system.
Blog text (5) -
Because I don't feel like sitting in a rubber room for forty-eight hours.
Fiction book (1994) -
The film had a picture of New York City rubber rooms and The New Yorker magazine had a long story on the rubber rooms leading New York City to close them down.
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The therapist recommended a stay in a rubber room to help him calm down during his outbursts.
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The school had a rubber room where teachers could bring troubled students for a time-out.
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase is compositionally interpretable: a B1 learner who knows 'rubber' and 'room' can infer a room lined or made of rubber (i.e., padded) and therefore likely used for safety or containment. However, the specific institutional/psychiatric sense—a padded seclusion room for isolating disruptive or dangerous individuals—is a pragmatic/cultural extension that is not fully predictable from the parts alone.
Etymology
Rubber room came from real rooms padded with rubber or soft walls so a person inside could not hurt themselves. So, it now means 'a room used to isolate and protect someone who is dangerous or very upset'.