LL-L "Idiomatica" 2005.08.04 (06) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

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L O W L A N D S - L * 04.AUG.2005 (06) * ISSN 189-5582 * LCSN 96-4226
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From: heather rendall <HeatherRendall at compuserve.com>
Subject: LL-L "Idiomatica" 2005.08.03 (06) [E]

Message text written by INTERNET:lowlands-l at LOWLANDS-L.NET
>
It's English too isn't it? We use it here also, "He fell with his bum in
the
butter."<

I've never heard this one!

Is it positive or negative??????????

I can't work out whether it is like : bread always falls butter side down
i.e. negative  or A cat always falls on its feet i.e. positive.

I can understand it wouldn't make the butter any better, but one would come
away with a lot of butter ; -))))

Heather

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From: R. F. Hahn
Subject: Idiomatica

Hi, Heather!

> I can understand it wouldn't make the butter any better, but one would 
> come
> away with a lot of butter ; -))))

Nice bit of poetry there.

> I've never heard this one!

I have a strong feeling it's a South African English thing only and is a 
loan ("idiomatic calque") from Afrikaans.  (This is an area we have hardly 
begun to look into so far.)

This "falling with X into butter" or "sitting in butter" may well be a 
Continental Lowlandic thing.  I vaguely remember hearing or reading a 
similar expression in Low Saxon, maybe something about butter in connection 
with marrying rich.  Does anyone remember?

> Is it positive or negative??????????

My guess is that it is positive.  Butter tended to be a symbol or metaphor 
for material wealth or at least a comfortable life.  Apparently only 
well-off folks could afford butter or could afford it everyday.  I suppose 
poorer folks had (oftentimes rancid) lard instead, or nothing at all.  This 
idea of butter being special was still alive when I was a child (sometime in 
the Dark Ages of course).  Even after the so-called West German "economic 
miracle" had started, most people had margarine most of the time and butter 
only on special occasions, perhaps on Sundays.  We referred to butter as 
"good butter" (Low Saxon _goude botter_, German _gute Butter_), and we 
usually meant "margarine" when we said only "butter."

It was especially butter, coffee, oranges and bananas that to most East 
Germans were the symbols of "exotic" (i.e., West German) "wealth" after 
Western Germany got ahead economically.   When my aunts visited us from the 
East, they were very keen on getting as much of those good things as they 
possibly could, but social norms dictated feigned modesty and led to 
numerous pretence games.  I still remember from my very early childhood 
(before the Wall) my aunts (country folks from the Polish border who had 
never been to a large city before) on the first morning after their arrival 
running around the place with the butter dish and my mother in hot pursuit. 
My mother had served butter for breakfast.  They pretended that that was 
just too much of a treat, pretending to return the dish to the refrigerator, 
and my mother's polite hospitable insistence was turning into annoyance 
about this and similar games being way too elaborate and going on for too 
long.  I was very entertained by that spectacle, almost as much as when one 
of those aunts, assuming it was a set of stairs, stepped the wrong way onto 
a self-starting escalator and fell off, in the middle of a posh department 
store (Alsterhaus), legs in the air, showing knee-length knickers underneath 
several sets of skirts.

Oh, yes!  No matter what -- there's always a story or three ... (even 
without the help of Advocaat).

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron

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