flutterbys

[Wilson Gray]

Butterfly excrement? Is that the source of the saying, "Don't sweat
the small shit"?

-Wilson

On 10/19/06, George Thompson <george.thompson at nyu.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       George Thompson <george.thompson at NYU.EDU>
> Subject:      flutterbys
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> A radio commercial for the NY State Lotteries is taking the theme
> of "amazing facts" (or some such).  At one part, the voice reads four
> or five names and states that they are the names of species of
> butterflies.  It next states that it is an amazing fact that
> butterflies were originally called flutterbys.
>
> This is a notion that isn't supported by the OED.  Nonetheless, it
> isn't original to the State Lottery bookies, either.  I've come upon
> it before.  And no doubt it's a prettier thought than the etymology
> endorsed half-heartedly by the OED, that "the insect was so called
> from the appearance of its excrement".
>
> GAT
>
> George A. Thompson
> Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
> Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.
>
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>


--
Everybody says, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange
complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is knows how deep
a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our
race. He brought death into the world.

--Sam Clemens

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