Skip to main content

Bread and Butter, a walking invocation

Anne just mentioned a few interesting quirky phrases she and her sisters use.

One is "bread and butter", used when two people are walking together and some obstacle comes up that will separate them -- just say "bread and butter" and it will be okay.  This would fall under phrases of superstition.  It's an incantation of sorts.  The idea is that bread and butter cannot be separated easily, so the two people walking will be safe from any misfortune.  In some reports, both people have to say it for it to have the desired effect.

I had never heard of this usage, but I'm sure I have heard similar things, like "step on a crack, break your father's back," meant to keep quirky influences away.

She says she has used it most of her life, and still thinks it in her head sometimes when a lamp post or some other obstacle comes up.  Wikipedia mentions it, without much history.

Hours later: Just now, we took a trip to target to buy some new sizes of luggage for a very confusing trip, and she went on the other side of a pole and said, "bread and butter".  I didn't know that was coming, so I did not join in.  So we're doomed now, because we didn't both beg for protection?  I thought of the cute variation that one person should say "bread" and the other should say "butter".

That should keep us together.

There are a lot of other ways that "bread and butter" are used.  I have future episodes planned ...

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A STORY about STOREY

Here is another case where two words differ in American/British meaning based on an extra E: STORY and STOREY. You can tell a STORY, it's a piece of narration or fiction, or a news story.  I don't normally think of it as a verb, but it can be.  I would normally say I was telling a STORY, but I could be STORYING.  Having finished the STORY, I suppose I am all STORIED out.  But, STORIED fits as an adjective too: if many stories have been told about you, you have lived a STORIED life. STOREY is a floor in a house, and to make matters a little more complex, in the British Isles, what we call the first floor (Am) is the ground floor and our second floor is their first storey (floor).  A taller building could have multiple STOREYS.  Merriam-Webster says that this STOREY is just a less common version of STORY, but it always felt to me like a specifically British version.  Cambridge has STOREYED, which would be used as an adjective, as in "a three-storeyed ho...
Post a Comment
Read more

Poor Frankenstein

Names can get mixed up, too. Real or fictional people can become legends, or end up garbled and forgotten. A classic case is poor Frankenstein. If you're picturing the big lumbering monster with the bolts in his neck ... oops. Frankenstein was the doctor who created the monster. The monster was simply known as "the monster" or "Frankenstein's Monster." Strangely, "Franken-" has become a prefix on its own. I've heard big ugly things named that way, from a Frankencouch to a Frankenpuppy. I wonder if this was urged along by the old FrankenBerry cereal? Sure is a weird thing to make a prefix out of, especially considering the original Franken- thing was not a monster, but a mad scientist. Now, where does Al Franken fit into all this?
2 comments
Read more

Similar but Not: Byre/Bier

Sometimes when rushing through a puzzle app, swiping words so quickly, the actual words can become a blur.  I am used to telling Anne about alternate American/English versions of words, like COLOR (Am) vs COLOUR (Eng) and NITER (Am) vs NITRE (Eng).  So I got into a blur where I ended up thinking BYRE and BIER were the same word, just different dialect spellings. But no, a BYRE is a shed for a cow, and a BIER is a typically wooden platform for carrying the dead.  So, if you have cattle, you can get them into the BYRE, but if you have a corpse or coffin to carry to a gravesite, a BIER would be the thing. In German, BIER is just BEER. And while swiping those letters, I misspelled BIER as BRIE, which is a soft spreadable cheese, like cream cheese.  I can't remember the last time I actually had some, but I seem to recall it looked like cream cheese but tasted skunky and awful.
Post a Comment
Read more