Day 149: Opportunities to Apologize

It goes against our prideful nature to apologize and then I take it a step further and am saying I am actually grateful for opportunities to apologize! And I'm being truthful. I am grateful for the times when I have a responsibility to apologize for my actions and/or words. I am grateful that opportunities for humbling myself come my way. It would be easy to claim (they would be false claims) that I am above apologizing, it would be easy to blame shift (which many do) so that I never need to apologize. But in behaving in those ways I deny myself the opportunity to grow in character, I damage relationships, and I live on an island of self-deception. So while it may go against my prideful nature to apologize I am grateful when an opportunity arises to practice it, even though I am usually regretful and chagrined that I engaged in a behavior that made the opportunity arise!

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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.

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.

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