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Chris -- 2018-04-11
I looked in the database and did not see this one…
In a reader response to a Frank Herbert opinion piece in the New York Times, a reader named “Will, St Louis, MO” mis-used the term “kid gloves”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/24/opini … rbert.html
quote
“We’ll see how Obama does trying to do “grown up” things, like running the war on terror while putting the kid’s gloves on our anti terror professionals…”.
end quote
My understanding is that kid gloves are dress gloves made with the soft leather of kid goats (as opposed to tougher leather work gloves), and therefore anyone or thing handled with with kid gloves is being handled with care.
There is an interesting [unintentional?] connection with “the kid’s gloves” as opposed to doing “grown-up things” mentioned earlier in the sentence – itself referring to “childish things” mentioned in President Obama’s inaugural address..
Last edited by instarx (2009-01-24 09:54:34)
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We’ve had many variations on this theme…
KIT gloves
KIND gloves
KITTEN gloves
Perhaps a few others.
I’m not sure whether KID’S gloves has been suggested before, but we might as well add it to the list.
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Kid gloves discussed here: http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/view … hp?id=1413
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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“Kid’s gloves†were discussed in the post kem references (most insightfully by kem himself.) But “the kid’s gloves†may be a bit different from other cases without the “theâ€. And “putting the kid’s gloves on our anti terror professionals†is certainly a bit different (if only by not being in the stereotypical “treat with …†context) from most other examples.
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Don’t know if this holds for the rest of you, but for me there is a persistent difference of imagery between (1) using gloves made especially for touching children (thus presumably soft and gentle to the touch, likely five-fingered gloves, perhaps made of terry-cloth or velvet or something), which I get with “treat them with kids’ (/kid’s) glovesâ€, and (2) (in instarx’s example) putting a pair of childish boxing gloves on the professionals, hampering if not crippling them in their attempts to fight effectively.
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There’s something subtle going on for me between three analyses: (a) [the [kids’ gloves]] “a particular set (esp. a pair) of (small, ineffective, boxing) glovesâ€, (b) [[the kids’] gloves] “(small, ineffective, boxing) gloves belonging to a particular group of childrenâ€, and© [[[the kid]’s] gloves] “(small, ineffective, boxing) gloves belonging to a particular child (or to Billy the Kid, perhaps)â€. Given the prevalence of s vs. ’s vs. s’ confusion, the orthography of instarx’s example doesn’t eliminate any of these.
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Sorry if that’s over-analyzing things, Pat! Just call me
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Rude Tugberg
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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The “the” changes things rather dramatically for me, too. If you put together “gloves” and “the kid,” I automatically think of boxing. “The kid” is a common nickname for a young boxer—at least in old boxing films, and then you’ve got famous boxers like “Kid Chocolate” and others I can’t think of at the moment. Of course, this interpretation might start moving the reshaping right out of eggcorn territory—treating someone with boxing gloves isn’t usually a way of treating them gently.
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I’ve noticed that in Horatio Alger and the like, wearing actual “kid gloves” was virtually synonymous with being a spoiled and snobbish dandy. I think this trope has a lot to do with the original idiom. To handle with kid gloves, to my mind, means to handle gingerly, to keep at a distance, so as not to be soiled with something common.
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I’m honored to know someone who reads Horatio Alger for pleasure. Are yiou a fan of 19th C American lit in particular, David? I notice many of your allusions refer to it.
Your theory about the original meaning of “with kid gloves” makes sense to me, but I couldn’t confirm it through any of the usual channels: some of the Books.google.com references from (apparently) the middle of the 19th C seemed to be using the phrase in more or less the modern sense—with gingerliness rather than squeamishness or disdain. About the only discussion I could find online was on Cecil Adams’s Straight Dope site (though in a post written by the Staff rather than by CA): http://www.straightdope.com/columns/rea … kid-gloves
They’re of the opinion that the “gentleness” sense of “with kid gloves” arose in the mid 1830s or earlier, while the use of “kid gloves” as a metonymy for foppishness dates from the mid 1800s.
Last edited by patschwieterman (2009-01-26 23:23:45)
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Well, I haven’t looked at Horatio Alger in a long time. The “kid gloves” business just stuck with me, for some reason. Thanks for the “Straight Dope” cite, which lends at least some support to my impression. I’m a little puzzled by “taking off the gloves.” Boxing gloves do not “soften the blow.” The padding is to protect the boxer’s hand, not his opponent’s face, so that the boxer can strike much harder. That’s why bare-knuckled fights went on for hours; sometimes there were 80 rounds. It’s very, very hard to knock someone out with a bare fist, pace Hollywood. And no, I don’t know any of this from experience!
Horatio Alger was an awful writer, but the interesting part is how he’s misremembered. His heroes don’t generally pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Rather, some rich guy notices their superior character, often after they’ve saved the boss’s daughter by grabbing her runaway horses or such, and gives them a good job
I actually have a thing for best-sellers of the turn of the last century—pretty good writers like Booth Tarkington and Owen Wister, and peculiar, queasy-making books like “Trail of the Lonesome Pine” and “Freckles” (Gene Strattorn Porter.) I like both the offhand portrayals of what daily life was like then and some of the weird preoccupations of popular sentimental culture. These pop up almost unaltered in D.W. Griffith’s movies, particularly his thing for 13-year-old girls.
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