You might be served garlic butter in a restaurant. You might have a skin lotion containing shea butter. You might even get some candy made with cocoa butter. But you’d have quite a different experience if you entered surrebutter.
In fact, “surrebutter” doesn’t have anything to do with butter at all. And you’re not going to run across it, because it’s both an obsolete word and an obsolete practice. It’s part of an old process in England of handling legal complaints. The way it worked was this: a plaintiff started off by making a declaration. Then the defendant made a plea. There was another round, where the plaintiff offered a “replication,” and the defendant offered a “rejoinder.” If that wasn’t enough to settle the case, they went another round, where the plaintiff and defendant stated their and “rebutter” and “surrejoinder”— and if there was yet another round, the plaintiff’s statement was a “surrebutter.”
What’s going on here, language-wise at least, is that the prefix “sur-“ is used in the same way that “super-“ can be used, to mean something that comes next — superceding what went before. There used to be more English words starting with “sur-“, including “surburdened,” “surciliary,” and “surflux” (a flood). An amended contract was, in the 1500s, a “surcontract.” And as recently as 1933, “surhuman” was occasionally used where today we’d say “superhuman” (not implying “better,” just “next.”)
There are still some words in current use using “sur” as a form of “super” — both “surcharge” and “surpass” are pretty common. (“Surfeit,” by the way, seems to have that “sur” just by coincidence; it’s originally a French word.) But there aren’t any more surrebutters; England revised their legal system decades ago, so even if there were still some holdouts using “surrebutter” at that point (there probably weren’t), it’s definitely gone by now.
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