'Butterflies Have Nothing to Do With Butter'

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.”