French Culinary Expression: COUNTING FOR BUTTER
From the outset, you would wager that this expression did not emerge in times of food deprivation...
Because the whole question is there: how butter , which usually conveys the idea of fattening, enriching, prospering (cf. the expressions "to make your own butter", "to put butter in spinach", "butter and the money of butter") could he take, in this expression born at the beginning of the XXth century the meaning of what is negligible, of what is not deemed worthy of consideration?
Many commentators break their teeth over this butter, which they go so far as to imagine being used out of confusion with another term!
However, Larousse noted in the 19th century that someone was said to be "selling butter" when he was left out of society, when a young girl was a tapestry artist at a ball, for example. And Littré gives us a very big pole: “Land of butter, it will melt in the sun: saying of the sailors to designate a distant fog that an inexperienced eye takes for the land. ".
To say of a thing that it is "of butter" (a phrase attested since the sixteenth century), would therefore amount to saying that it does not exist.
Children, when they play, to stand out from reality, don't they take care to affirm “it's for fake” or “it's for butter”?
