Fwd: pearl-clutching

[Arnold Zwicky]

from a friend who uses various versions of the expression and has for years:

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Chris Ambidge <chris.ambidge at utoronto.ca>
> Date: August 12, 2011 4:47:34 PM PDT
> To: Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu>
> Subject: Re: Fwd: pearl-clutching
> 
> Hello Arnold:
> 
> I can tell you exactly when I first ran across "pearl-clutching".  My friend Bill Morrison, anglican cleric in Victoria BC ... wrote it in an article in *Integrator*, the newsletter of Integrity which I edit.  The online version of the article is here:  http://toronto.integritycanada.org/integrator/i45.html#456 .  The reference is in the third paragraph.  The issue date on that volume     is 2004 12 15, though the article was written a couple of months before that.
> 
> That dating is for the use of the exact phrase "pearl-clutching". Bill was the first person to arrange it thataway, and I recall being impressed with the felicity of the phrase.
> 
> However, I'd been using variations on same, as in "eek! clutch the     pearls", or "where ARE my pearls when I need to clutch them", for years before that, all of them meaning an expression of mock/hyperbolic horror (as in, "I'm nearly out of tea.  Clutch the pearls!").  I've also seen a Tshirt in Out In The Street, our local queer-ware gift shop, and source for homo-funny shirts, with the slogan "In Case Of Emergency .... clutch pearls".  Someone gave me that shirt in 2000 or so.  And the reason they gave it to me was     that it's something I said more than once (so earlier than that).
> 
> with a date-limited search on Google, I got "clutch the pearls" in the Buffalo Evening News :  "23 Apr 1993 - WELL, CLUTCH the pearls, girls! As Antoine Merriweather, the lip-glossed character on "In Living Color," David Alan Grier became America's most flamboyant ..." , but that "earliest date" might be an artefact of the date of the posting to the Interwebz, as opposed to the date of the actual publication.

"clutch the pearls" is in a few dictionaries of gay slang (in one, glossed as 'gasp'), but of course without citations or datings; these things are just lists of words and phrases.

E. Patrick Johnson has a chapter on gay black discourse in Leap & Boellstorff (ed.), Speaking in Queer Tongues (2004), with several mentions of "clutch the pearls" (and the accompanying gesture) in this community.

it also seems to have a history in the British gay cant Polari.

arnold

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