A lot of people aren't grateful for silence. It makes them squirm, it makes them feel unsettled, it unnerves them. Why is that? I think it is because we have filled our days, and nights, with so much noise from so many devices and other things that we don't even know what silence is any longer or what to do with it. But I am grateful for silence. I am grateful that sometimes I sit in my house and literally the only sound I hear is the faint ticking of our clock or the wind blowing outside. That's about as close to silence as I'm going to get. But I'm grateful for it because my days are too noisy. In fact a while back, on the previous 365, I ruminated about silence. Click here to read that. I read it and noted that not much has changed in my thoughts about silence since I wrote that. I still crave it and when it presents itself I am profoundly grateful for it, as is my soul.
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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