David Feldman

Who Put The Butter In Butterfly

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The English language is filled with familiar words that, when one thinks about them, are downright peculiar: cooties, doozies, and heepie-jeebies; finks and funks; mugwumps and muumuus; deep six and cloud nine. There's only one pundit to solve these and other riddles of our spoken tongue: David Feildman, who in his bestselling Imponderables™ book and Why Do Clocks Run Clockwise? has established himself as the unchallenged expert on answering and unanswerable.
Word Imponderables™ have always been favorites with Feldman's legions of fans, and in  Who Put the Butter in Butterfly? he gets to the source of all the mysteries surrounding our curious vocabulary. Why do we mid our Ps and Qs and not our Vs and Ws? Which Toms lent their names to Peeping Tom, Tom Collins, and tommy gun. How does a Weasel go “pop” — and why for that matter? And who are the Joneses we're supposed to be keeping up with?
Who Put the Butter in Butterfly? is a reference book you can't afford to be without. So don't beat around the bush, and don't wait until the eleventh hour to until the jig is up. This is compulsive reading for anyone incurable curious about the idiosyncrasies fo the language.
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182 printed pages
Publication year
2009
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Quotes

  • ;has quoted6 years ago
    In some variations of tag (called both “wood tag” and “tree tag”), if you touch a tree, you are “free.” The English say “touch wood” rather than “knock wood,” and tag might be the source of the English variant.
  • ;has quoted6 years ago
    Knocking on wood (i.e., on a tree), then, was an attempt to wake up the spirits and enlist their help
  • ;has quoted6 years ago
    Backing and filling means alternating having the sails “filled” with wind and then allowing the wind to escape by hauling “back” on the stays.
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