What's-his-clutch
Posted: Thu Jul 08, 2010 5:57 am
I can understand the self-documenting terms
"what's-his-face/what's-her-face";
"what's-his-name/what's-her-name";
"what-d'ya-call-him/what-d'ya-call-her" (or 'words' to that effect)
,
but why, in the same vein, do we say
"What's-his-clutch/what's-her-clutch"
???
[ Once again, I was trying to explain this to someone from a foreign country......??clutch?? ]
.....I should qualify to say that at least "we" say it in Kansas; it could be the case that it is a rural term.
I could envision "clutch" as having maybe a lewd meaning. But my tendency is to think of "clutch" as being associated with a machine. For instance, I could see, in particular, some rube referring to a person like he/she was a tractor.
Or maybe "clutch" could be associated with something that allows something else to "go", so maybe it could be associated with a "heart", yet we don't say "what's-his-heart/ what's-his-noggin, etc. I have really only heard the above variations and somehow "clutch" seems to be the odd-man-out. The others are fairly evident.
Those are the only ideas I can logically derive, but there is probably some obscure story behind it that is far afield from that.
"what's-his-face/what's-her-face";
"what's-his-name/what's-her-name";
"what-d'ya-call-him/what-d'ya-call-her" (or 'words' to that effect)
,
but why, in the same vein, do we say
"What's-his-clutch/what's-her-clutch"
???
[ Once again, I was trying to explain this to someone from a foreign country......??clutch?? ]
.....I should qualify to say that at least "we" say it in Kansas; it could be the case that it is a rural term.
I could envision "clutch" as having maybe a lewd meaning. But my tendency is to think of "clutch" as being associated with a machine. For instance, I could see, in particular, some rube referring to a person like he/she was a tractor.
Or maybe "clutch" could be associated with something that allows something else to "go", so maybe it could be associated with a "heart", yet we don't say "what's-his-heart/ what's-his-noggin, etc. I have really only heard the above variations and somehow "clutch" seems to be the odd-man-out. The others are fairly evident.
Those are the only ideas I can logically derive, but there is probably some obscure story behind it that is far afield from that.