For Saturday, June 11: Xing Fu De Bao Zheng (The Promise of Happiness)

Vic Chou is a boy band member. He sings in Mandarin (in case you are wondering what dialect you are listening to!) and he is Taiwanese. He also is an actor. I think he might be kind of a big deal but I don't know for sure since I can't read, speak, or understand Chinese and all it's various dialects! ;)
So here's the deal. I feel completely uninspired for today's song and one of my unspoken goals for this 365 experiment is to get at least one song from each letter of the alphabet on there. So I googled "songs that start with x" and all the ones from rappers, etc were going to obviously be really inappropriate and disgusting so I focused in on the Chinese ones! :) That's how I landed on Vic Chou.
He has a very nice voice and from watching the video he tells a good story in his songs. I have absolutely NO CLUE what the song is about because when I googled the lyrics they all came up mandarin so...I kinda have to go by the video and his demeanor to guess that in the song he is telling of a promise for happiness with this girl and he keeps hoping and he keeps leaving her messages but she never comes and yet he still holds on to the promise of happiness. ?? Watch the video for yourself and tell me what you see!
Ha! A song that starts with "x". Happy day!

Xing Fu De Bao Zheng (The Promise of Happiness)

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.

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.

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.

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