'The Side on Which Its Bread Is Buttered'

In his essay on Chaucer in My Study Windows (1871), the American poet James Russell Lowell digresses on the character of the “Anglo-Saxon race.” In modern parlance, he means the English. He asks what is their “leading mental feature” and answers, “understanding, common-sense.” Dr. Johnson, he says, is representative, though Lowell is not entirely flattering:

“The Saxon, as it appears to me, has never shown any capacity for art, nay, commonly commits ugly blunders when he is tempted in that direction. He has made the best working institutions and the ugliest monuments among the children of men. He is wanting in taste, which is as much as is to say that he has no true sense of proportion.”

Kneejerk nineteenth-century American chauvinism? The urge to establish an American literature, untainted by the English inheritance? Or a tongue-in-cheek satirical gag? Or all of the above?

 

“Among all races perhaps none has shown so acute a sense of the side on which its bread is buttered, and so great a repugnance for having fine phrases take the place of the butyraceous principle.”

The buttered bread idiom I know. It means being aware of who to please for one’s own advantage; bluntly, knowing whose ass to kiss. Butyraceous lost me. The OED comes to the rescue -- “of the nature of butter; buttery” – and cites Lowell’s usage. The word comes only slightly modified from the Latin butyrum, meaning butter. This is Lowell’s witty way of saying the English are by nature given to plain speaking. They are bluff. He goes on:

“They invented the words ‘humbug,’ ‘cant,’ ‘sham,’ ‘gag,’ soft-sodder,’ ‘flapdoodle,’ and other disenchanting formulas whereby the devil of falsehood and unreality gets his effectual apage Satana!”

 “Soft-sodder” (or “soft-sawder”) means to flatter, to suck up. Apage Satana!, from the Roman Catholic ritual of exorcism can be translated “Away with you, Satan!” Lowell might be writing with Jonathan Swift in mind.