Day 318: Vicarious Living

(For Thursday July 10)

I am grateful for people who go places I won't be able to, do things I cannot, experience different cultures that I don't have a chance to experience and then share those things with *us*. I am grateful for their willingness to share their trips and for the chance to vicariously live through them! Whether I know them personally or not I love living different cultures and such through the eyes, ears, and mouth of others. It expands my world, it gives me insight into different cultures, it reminds me that we are all different and yet the same. Right now I have a friend who is in Romania and traveled through Vienna to get there. She is a frequent world traveler and always posts tons of pics and I am so grateful! I love seeing other parts of this great big world. I'm reading a book right now about a family that traveled the world for one full year. Fascinating. Through their experiences I am living vicariously as well. I was thinking about it earlier today and realized how grateful I was to live vicariously through others. I consider it a gift they share with *us*.

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.

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.

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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