I know it's very "first world" but I am super grateful for the Food Network. Because of it my cooking skills have increased ten-fold. I have grown from Velveeta Mac 'n Cheese and Hamburger Helper to complex dishes with flavors I had never even heard of growing up! It's helped me be brave in experimenting with spices, go "rogue" from the recipe every so often (not so easy for a Type A let me tell you), and be willing to expand my food experiences into other cultures outside of the mid-west fare I grew up on. Seriously, the Food Network introduced me to a whole new and fantastic world of cooking and I, and I'm hoping my family, am so grateful.
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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