At least in the Northern Hemisphere, the time of year when you can see butterflies is past. But what’s with the “butter” in “butterfly”? Butterflies aren’t drawn to butter; they alight on flowers. It’s regular non-butter flies that would prefer butter.
It could be that “butterfly” is “flutter by” slightly mixed up, like a young child might do. After all, butterflies definitely do flutter, and since they’ve never shown much interest in people, when you see one, it flutters by without stopping to say hello. Unfortunately, nobody has found any reason to think that the word “butterfly” resembling “flutter by” is anything but a coincidence.
The oldest mention of “butterfly” is quite old indeed. In an Old English glossary compiled somewhere around 1500 years ago, it appears as “buterflege.” The glossary doesn’t offer any opinion about why that particular insect has that name, but there’s a clue if you check the kinds of butterflies most likely to be seen around human settlements in northern Europe at the time. Or even now, for that matter. The native butterflies around those parts are most often white or off-white. That’s the natural color of butter — we (at least those of us in the US) think of butter as yellow because nowadays dye is often added to it for some reason (yeah, why do they do that?). Back when they were naming butterflies, the ones they saw just looked like the same color as butter. So that could be where the word came from.
On the other hand, at about the same time butterflies were getting their name, many people believed in fairies. Supposedly fairies would change their shapes, sneak into farms at night, and steal butter! The shape they favored, for some reason, was a butterfly. This, in spite of the obvious point that a medium-sized squirrel can probably carry a thousand times as much butter as a butterfly. And anyone paying attention would notice that butterflies don’t fly (or sneak into farms) at night; those would be moths. But letting information get in the way of a good folktale is bad form. And after all, do we really know why modern butter is dyed a different color? Maybe it’s just to disguise it from those sneaky fairies. Fairies’ favorite colors are red, green, and blue, right? I mean, they were in that movie about Snow White…
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