I'm grateful today for the sense of touch. For the nerve receptors that convey to us pain or pleasure. I am always heartbroken to hear of people who have tactile impairments. Sense of touch isn't just important for the hugging and the pleasurable things but it also serves as a warning to us in regards to pain (heat/burning, etc). Just like our other senses, we don't think too much about touch until we lose it or it becomes damaged somehow. How about you? How often have you thought about touch and been grateful you have it?
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.
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