The thing about gratefulness is that it doesn't discriminate between significant and insignificant, small and large, grandiose and mediocre. It is all encompassing and I'm grateful for that aspect of gratefulness. The reason I bring this up is because today I felt grateful for my jasmine green tea which I happen to also love. (Sometimes we don't love the things/people/etc that we are grateful for, we can be grateful for something but not love it.) When I sip a hot cup of jasmine green tea (sweetened with raw sugar) I feel like my soul is taking a deep breath. No matter where I am or what I am doing when I sip it. And I'm grateful that something so insignificant like jasmine green tea can prompt something so necessary, like taking a deep soul breath, in my days.
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.
Comments
Post a Comment