I should think this Gratitude Attitude goes without saying for most anyone! I am immensely grateful for the self-clean feature on my oven. If it ever "dies" I am fixing it or doing whatever it takes to get it working again. It saves me time, sore arms, and frustration.
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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