Today I'm feeling grateful for my burden bearer. Clearly I can't carry my burdens anyway so I might as well let the one who offers to carry them do so. His shoulders are wider and strong than mine and he has endurance that surpasses any I will ever be able to muster up. I'm so weary lately. And my weariness is a mental and emotional weariness that bleeds over into a physical weariness. It's made up of burdens that will take time to work themselves out and I just can't carry them, I feel broken under the strain of their weight. So to have a burden bearer that graciously offers to bear what makes me weary is a relief and I am filled with gratitude.
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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