Day 124: Sense of Smell

I've alluded to smelling things already but I've never actually focused on just the actual sense of smell. What a wondrous thing! It gives us pleasure, it warns us away from something (I'm thinking skunks), it prompts other senses to kick in. I love walking into a place that has coffee brewing and something baking, the smell is divine. Sometimes the sense of smell tells me who was just in the space I have moved into - people sometimes have a very strong signature scent/smell. Good or bad sometimes what I smell transports me to a memory of a place, a person, or an experience. Sense of smell is one of those things that I think most of us take for granted until we don't have it any longer. Maybe today we could pay more attention to the gift of the sense of smell and inhale the world around us.

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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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