[Note: This post was updated on Nov. 2, 2025.]
Q: This is from a posting on Care2 about funding for the Senate campaigns of Elizabeth Warren and Scott Brown: “Plenty of politicians pearl-clutch over the impact of Citizens United but complain that they are helpless to do anything about it.” Can you explain the phrase “pearl-clutch”?
A: The verbal phrase “pearl-clutch” and several similar expressions, including “pearl clutching,” “clutch my pearls,” “clutch the pearls,” “they clutched their pearls,” and so on, are often accompanied by a gesture suggesting the clutching of an imaginary string of pearls.
They convey the image of a genteel, perhaps prudish lady whose hand dramatically flies to her chest—where, as often as not, she’s wearing pearls. The actual gesture is reminiscent of old silent films and stage melodramas from the turn of the last century, though it didn’t get its “pearl clutching” names until the gesture became figurative instead of literal.
The figurative expressions usually refer to shock or outrage of one sort or another—real shock, mock shock, amused shock, awed shock, or shock over something that’s not generally considered really shocking. So “pearl clutching” is comparable to “hand-wringing” and being “shocked, SHOCKED.”
But this is an evolving usage and in the posting you cited from the social network Care2, the lawyer-writer Jessica Pieklo uses “pearl-clutch,” minus the shock, to mean grumble uselessly.
Pieklo praises Warren and Brown for trying to reduce the impact of the Citizens United case on their Senate race, but then says (in the sentence you cite) that a lot of other politicians just fret about the Supreme Court ruling without doing anything about it.
Most dictionaries today define “pearl clutching” as an exaggerated response, deliberately expressing more shock than appropriate, and possibly more than you really feel.
So if someone says you’re clutching your pearls, they’re calling you a hypocrite—faking outrage about something that’s not so outrageous.
The earliest example we’ve found of this figurative usage is from the late 70s. And it may indicate that it originated in gay slang.
In the February 1979 issue of Off Our Backs, a journal published by a lesbian/feminist collective, the Black writer Sheila Brown described a meeting at which the white members of the collective were accused of racism.
She said she heard gasps and “could see them clutching the pearls they no longer wear (unless they’re going home). Well, after all the pearl-clutching we finally got down to something we could all relate to.”
(As we said, this is the earliest figurative usage we’ve found. The much older ones we’ve examined are literal, including an oft-quoted snippet from 1909. Read in context, the passage from the Chambers Journal in fact depicts a man stealing a strand of pearls from a dressing table.)
After that Off Our Backs example, the figurative usage showed up only sporadically for a few years, usually in gay slang.
Speaking in Queer Terms (2003), a collection of essays about the globalization of gay men’s English, edited by William L. Leap and Tom Boellstorff, includes several examples of gay men using “pearl-clutch” in the sense of shock, surprise, and even awed admiration, though it doesn’t cite dates.
However, perhaps the best-known example in gay usage is from a 1990 episode of the Fox TV show In Living Color.
In an April 15, 1990, sketch, a flamboyant movie critic (played by Damon Wayans) gushes over how daring the producers were to cast a male actor as the female lead in Dangerous Liaisons.
When told that Glenn Close is actually a woman, he squeals, “Well, clutch the pearls! What a sneaky thing to do.”
In the last 20 years or so, the phrase has been used in blogs, particularly of the “girl-talk” sort, and in various other kinds of popular usage.
And in the last decade, it’s been showing up in political writing and speech as a way to dismiss or ridicule the opposition.
For example, Washington Monthly in July 2015 published an article headlined “The Role of Peggy Noonan’s Pearl Clutching.”
In the piece, Nancy LeTourneau wrote: “I have to admit that no one on the right intrigues me more than Peggy Noonan. It might be because she is the most prominent female conservative pundit. But it also has to do with her unique skill at pearl-clutching. She is absolutely the queen of that venue.”
In the 2020s, the usage seemed to catch on more firmly in the political language of the Beltway. Fast forward to a couple of examples from October 2025:
On Oct. 14, in response to leaked GOP group-chat messages that joked about racism, rape and gas-chambers, J.D. Vance wrote, “I refuse to join the pearl clutching when powerful people call for political violence.”
And on Oct. 19, the disgraced former Congressman George Santos said after he was released from prison, “So pardon me if I’m not paying too much attention to the pearl-clutching of the outrage of my critics.”
Check out our books about the English language