Meaning
To treat someone or something with extreme gentleness, tact, or caution, typically because they are seen as fragile, volatile, or easily offended. It often carries a critical undertone, implying that the delicacy shown is excessive or patronising. Standard in all main English varieties, in speech and writing. Neutral register with a frequent edge of criticism, suggesting the caution taken is excessive. Regional use: General English (clothing origin).
Origin
Kid gloves were made from kidskin, the soft leather of a young goat, though eighteenth-century pairs were often lambskin; they were costly markers of leisure and genteel hands, and in Britain the word carried snobbish overtones (an 1842 Leicester Chronicle item used kid-gloved as an insult implying unmanliness). The gloves themselves are recorded from the seventeenth century. An American antecedent of the figurative sense appears in a Vermont newspaper of 1839, which wrote of a politician that they will handle him in kid gloves. The Phrase Finder traces the earliest known use in the modern sense to The Knickerbocker, New York, 1849: neither do we handle them with kid gloves, when they fairly come in the way. The careful, delicate sense thus crystallised in American print before spreading back to Britain, and it remains fully current.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- handle something with kid gloves
- kid-glove treatment
- kid-gloves approach
- treat someone with kid gloves
- with kid gloves
Usage Examples
- The committee handled the retiring curator with kid gloves, praising decades of service while quietly shelving her exhibition plan.
- This gearbox is temperamental, so handle it with kid gloves until the replacement seals arrive.
- Reporters have stopped treating the minister with kid gloves now that the polling data has turned against her.