Call me an aesthete but I’ve always favored the definition of butterfly given by Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary: “A beautiful insect, so named because it first appears at the beginning of the season for butter.” Their seemingly gratuitous beauty, coupled with not stinging like bees or biting like ticks, wins butterflies the insect popularity contest even among non-entomological humans.
In Origin Uncertain: Unraveling the Mysteries
of Etymology (Oxford, 2024), the linguist Anatoly Liberman questions
Johnson’s etymology of the word without dismissing it. His theory seems to be
an example of folkloric entomological etymology. Word origins, Liberman tells
up in his introduction, are “hard to penetrate or reconstruct.” He reviews some
of the butterfly theories:
Butterfly was originally the name of a yellow species, such
as the cabbage or brimstone, which later was extended to all species.
The first
butterflies one sees, at least at the northern latitudes, are “butter-creamy”
and arrive during the “butter season,”
March to November.
“Vats
containing butter have special attraction for butterflies.”
“Or (perhaps
the most common explanation) the popular superstition has it that witches turn
into butterflies and steal milk and butter.”
Butterfly is a corruption of flutter-by.
Their
excrement resembles butter.
Liberman has
a sense of humor: “In the past, some of those who had the courage to translate
Dutch boterschijte (the main support
for the excrement etymology) into English bemoaned the degradation of the
butterfly: from Psyche (in Greek, psyche
is both ‘soul’ and its incarnation ‘butterfly’) to a butter-shitter.” He
neither dismisses nor endorses any of these theories, and notes that the Old English
word for butterfly is buttor-fleoge. He concludes:
“[W]hen all is said and done, we should admit that butterflies
have nothing to do with butter. To an etymologist, beautiful, fluttering
butterflies are sometimes more dangerous than mad dogs: they don’t bite but are
harder to catch.”
I remember a
butter-related bit of folklore we learned as kids. We picked buttercups in the
fields behind the house (where I also caught many butterflies) and held the
blossoms against another’s throat. If their skin glowed yellow, it meant they
loved butter. Today I can think of easier ways to gauge butter-love.
Naturally, I
think of the twentieth-century’s most famous lepidopterist and his lifelong love
of butterflies. This is the conclusion of Chap. 6 in Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory (1966):
“I confess I
do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a
way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip.
And the highest enjoyment of timelessness -- in a landscape selected at random --
is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy,
and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like
a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with
sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern - to the
contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.”
3 comments:
Hahaha I like this.
The cover of Barbra Streisand's 1974 album, "ButterFly," has a photo of a house fly sitting on top of a stick of butter.
Visual etymology, I guess.
When I was ferrying the kids around in my days as Chauffeur Dad, I’d regale them with “short poems.” One was “Butterfly, Flutterby.” Another was “Oh no, Snow.” Now I inflict them on my grandchildren.
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