I'm so grateful for mercy. Daily I experience small mercies, huge mercies, and mercies in between. I am gifted mercy by people in my life and by the One who created me. I get to see mercy in action, I get to participate in it. Not only am I a grateful recipient of mercy but I get to pass it out as well. I get to be a giver of mercy. Giving it is an overflow of receiving it. I don't hoard it but I pay it forward.
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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