cling to the skirts of

English

Etymology

From the image of a child clinging to his or her mother's skirts for reassurance and safety.

Verb

cling to the skirts of (third-person singular simple present clings to the skirts of, present participle clinging to the skirts of, simple past and past participle clung to the skirts of)

1. To depend upon and be unwilling to relinquish.
   • 1860, Thomas Prentice Kettell, Southern Wealth and Northern Profits As Exhibited in Statistical Facts and Official Figures:

     Idleness is his chief good, and pauperism and theft are for the race not an unwelcome means of attaining their object. The vis inertia of the black blood is so great, that even a large mixture of white blood will overcome it only so far as to induce the individual to perform menial offices, clinging to the skirts of white society.

   • 2013, John O'Loughlin, Ethnic Universality -: The Next Totalitarianism, →ISBN:

     Therefore the falsely masculine cling to the skirts of the Diabolic for fear that they should be obliged to come to terms, one way or another, with God's just retribution, whereas the genuinely masculine, who are still fearful of God and therefore theoretically faithful unto the possibility of godliness, remain open to the possibility of light as the redemption of heat and master of motion, remain open, in short, to the possibility of God and of divine deliverance from the world and all that would deny such deliverance in favour of that false relationship between Man and the Devil, antihumanity and devility, which far from conjoining pluralism with monism bespeaks a double pluralism the only outcome of which is the denial of monism on both phenomenal and, especially, noumenal terms.

   • 2016, Helen Callaghan, Dear Amy, →ISBN, page 173:

     Cambridge is my alma mater in truth, and I do tend to cling to her skirts, despite Eddy's disgust.

2. To be closely associated with or proximate to.
   • 1899 (please specify the page), Joseph Conrad, “The Heart of Darkness”, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, volume CLXV, New York, N.Y.: The Leonard Scott Publishing Company, […], →OCLC, part:

     Sometimes we came upon a station close by the bank, clinging to the skirts of the Unknown, and the white men rushing out of a tumble-down hovel, with great gestures of joy and surprise and welcome, seemed very strange—had the appearance of being held there captive by a spell.

   • 1990, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Frances Smith Foster, A Brighter Coming Day, →ISBN:

     Shall Lee, with tens of thousands of murders clinging to his skirts, escape the full desert of his crimes, and this man, who aided his victims, die a felon's death?

   • 2010, Nancy C. Muir, Project 2010 For Dummies, →ISBN, page 99:

     You can tell when a summary task has a family of subtasks clinging to its skirts: When a subtask is hidden, a little plus-sign symbol is displayed next to its summary task.