Today a friend and I cooked up a couple of soups together. I found myself grateful for the opportunity to cook with a friend. Maybe it's that whole "many hands make light work" philosophy or maybe it's the companionship or maybe it's the comfort of cooking with someone else who can kind of read your mind and you can read theirs and the dance around the kitchen is fluid. Maybe it's all of those things! But I was grateful for the time we spent boiling this, chopping that, stirring this, tasting that.
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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