You’d think everyone in Washington was wearing pearls, given how frequently people are accused of grasping them these days. Saddened by the East Wing demolition? Well, “losers who are quick to criticize need to stop their pearl clutching,” White House adviser Stephen Cheung said in October. Surprised George Santos was pardoned? He’d like you to know that he won’t be “paying too much attention to the pearl-clutching” of his critics. Troubled by that racist Young Republican Telegram chat that leaked? “I refuse to join the pearl-clutching,” JD Vance said after the outcry.
Dismissing one’s critics as prissy pearl-clutchers is hardly new, as anyone who’s gotten into online political fights is well aware. But lately it seems to have graduated to the top levels of government. And it’s not just MAGA: Jasmine Crockett, John Fetterman, and other Democrats have also thrown around the term. The phrase resonates because it’s both effective and evocative, making your opponent look foolish while conjuring a very specific, funny image of an upper-crust socialite type who’s scandalized—or pretending to be—by some supposed transgression.
“This phrase is an easy way to dismiss any kind of criticism,” says Deborah Tannen, a professor in Georgetown University’s linguistics department and author of The Argument Culture: Stopping America’s War of Words. It’s about “undermining your critics rather than taking them head-on.” Tannen notes the phrase’s tinge of misogyny—negatively connecting the target “with women, and—even more dismissable—women’s association with trivial, frivolous baubles like a pearl necklace.”
Patricia O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman, who run the language blog Grammarphobia, have done significant research on the phrase, and the earliest use they’ve found in the metaphorical sense is in a 1979 issue of the feminist magazine Off Our Backs, in which writer Sheila Brown describes the reactions of white women who have been accused of racism. The term has made other appearances over the years—on the 1990s show In Living Color, for example—but it was hardly ubiquitous. The first appearance we could find in the Washington Post came from columnist Petula Dvorak, who in 2011 described the “pearl-clutching and hand-wringing” reaction to an article she’d written about growing diversity in the suburbs. Actually, Dvorak was responsible for the second and third uses in the Post as well. Apparently, it gets its hooks in you.
These kinds of stock phrases are a familiar downside of internet discourse—atrophied language that people hear and repeat and amplify as a way of sounding smart without doing any real thinking. But pearl-clutching has caught on as a dodge because it’s more useful than much of that received language: Properly wielded, it does seem to somewhat deflate criticism.
And it’s a particularly potent weapon in Washington, where reserved establishment types are a fixture and it’s not unheard of to see literal pearls dangling around prominent necks. “Pearls are a gem very much for this area,” says Jorge Adeler of Adeler Jewelers in Great Falls. He notes their traditional popularity among First Ladies and other political figures, who often opt for a less ostentatious substitute for diamonds. As his daughter and business associate Wendy Adeler Hall puts it, “You can’t show wealth in the political arena as comfortably as you would as a private citizen. Pearls are a more subtle way to adorn yourself.”
Could the popularity of “pearl-clutching” change that? We asked Jeremy Shepherd, who runs the Association of American Pearls, to weigh in. “I definitely don’t think people are going to stop wearing pearls because somebody says, ‘Oh, dear, clutch your pearls,’ ” he insists. And Shepherd says the term doesn’t bug him personally. “It’s satire, but at the same time, it’s calling out what pearls actually are: something that’s like a pure-innocence beauty. There’s nothing really to be offended by. You know, publicity is always good.”
This article appears in the December 2025 issue of Washingtonian.
