For Sunday, February 10: Resolve to Love

The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. Thomas Merton

If we love, truly love, someone then we will love them for who they are and not who we think they should be. We will not try to transform the person into our ideas of what they should do, be, look like, etc. If we find ourselves try to twist someone we say we love into our own image then perhaps we should ask ourselves, "Do we really love them?" and if so, "Why do we love them?" We need to be resolved to love others well. Loving well means we let them be themselves as they are letting us be ourselves.

Comments

Butter someone up

There are two probable origins for this idiom and I think both are equally plausible. The first one is that when you spread butter on bread you are buttering it up like one would do when trying to flatter someone. The second is in ancient India there was a practice of throwing balls of butter at statues to ask for favor, i.e. buttering them up. ( source ) When we use the phrase today we generally mean that extreme flattery is used to gain information or favor. It's not always necessarily a compliment.

Call it a Day

The literal use of this phrase hails from 1838 when the phrase originally was "call it half a day" to mean leaving work early. (source) The modern use of the phrase is to indicate ending something due to false sense of accomplishment.

More bang for your buck

This phrase was used a lot in 1953 but an earlier citation puts it at 1940 in a Metals and Plastics Publications advertisement. Read about it here . The phrase means you get more for your money.

Search This Blog