David comes from Hong Kong has a question about the expression “straight time”. For example this is the third straight time that I have seen this movie or this is the fifth straight time that the government has raised our taxes.
When we use the number, a number like fifteenth or third and notice that it is what we would call an ordinal number, an “ordinal” tells you what order something is in and in English these often end in the letters “th”. So for the number fifteen, the ordinal number would be “fifteenth”. There are some exceptions “first”, “second”, “third” don’t end in “th” but most of the other ordinal numbers do.
Well, to say something has happened the third straight time or the fifteenth time means it has happened the third consecutive time, one after another, after another. So for example let’s say that today you are going to the movie and yesterday you went to the movie, and the day before yesterday you went to the movie, if you go to the movie tomorrow you will be going the fourth straight time. And let’s say you don’t go to the movie tomorrow, you go to the beach, and then on the day after tomorrow you go to the movie again. well, that won’t be the fourth straight time when you go to the movie the day after tomorrow because something else happens in between, it wasn’t consecutive. The other word we use here is “in a row” means one after another, after another with nothing else coming in between.
So that is the expression “straight time” when someone says the third straight time or the tenth straight time, they mean the third consecutive time or the third time in a row, All those mean the same thing. so thanks David for his question.
