The way to understanding

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view...Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it. Harper Lee

It's an art of sorts to get outside of yourself and purposefully place yourself in the shoes of another. It's an act of selflessness to consider another's perspective. Have you ever let go of your irritation with someone long enough to try and understand where they might be coming from? Have you ever made the choice to go beyond the surface of someones behavior and try to understand their depths - where they speak and behave from? We cannot really know another person until we make the decision to "climb inside of his [her] skin and walk around in it." Until we make a decision to come to an understanding of who they really are below the surface we won't understand them. And when we make the choice to do that something happens - we have compassion for them. We don't have to agree with them to have compassion and understanding. We should make it our goal to understand people and not just interact with them on the surface level of their lives. Just as we want people to interact with us so we should do the same. Want to be understood? Then begin by understanding.

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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