Butter gremlins
Before I get into words & books this week, I want you all to know that my beloved says “I LOVE IT, IT’S IN THE NEWSLETTER, DONE” whenever I mention an interesting word.
You have to imagine those phrases as they would be spoken in this Key & Peele sketch about the creation of Gremlins 2:
So here, this week, is a word whose etymological note made me gasp “WHAT” out loud, leading my beloved to say “I LOVE IT, IT’S IN THE NEWSLETTER,” etc., etc.
BUTTERFLY, n. This is a weird fucking word, right? Butterflies don’t look anything like regular flies, and they definitely don’t look like butter. They do have wings and can fly, I’ll give you that.
As usual, French-versus-English tumblr is on it:
I love these posts because I love the funhouse-mirror vision of English through the eyes of non-native speakers. Once while I was teaching in France, a student asked me if I thought about fenêtres (windows) every time I used my computer. I was confused until he added “You know, like Microsoft Windows.” (He was really disappointed when I said no.)
Anyway, butterflies.
I actually started my etymological journey from French, because I was reading some of Baudelaire’s art criticism and he used the word papillotages (papilloter is “to blink” or “to flutter” and papillotage can be “blinking” or blurring/dazzling as when you look at really bright lights). That made me think about papillon (butterfly). As far as I can tell from poking through some dictionaries, papilloter and papillon aren’t directly related. It’s a coincide that they sound alike. That’s weird, but nowhere near as weird as “butterfly.”
So what’s up with “butterfly”? I’m just gonna quote The Online Etymology Dictionary here:
…the name is of obscure signification. Perhaps based on the old notion that the insects (or, according to Grimm, witches disguised as butterflies) consume butter or milk that is left uncovered. Or, less creatively, simply because the pale yellow color of many species' wings suggests the color of butter.
WHAT. What?! We named these little colorful fluttery things butterflies because we thought they were stealing our dairy products? Or possibly that they were witches in disguise?
Yeah, yeah, lots of them are yellow in color, like butter or cream. That explanation is the most boring so it’s probably true. (This is my own version of Occam’s Razor: the dullest etymology is the most likely.) Whatever let’s go back to the butter gremlins. I LOVE IT, IT’S IN THE NEWSLETTER, NEXT.
Lest you think butter-stealing witches in disguise is the best it gets—and it’s real good, I gotta say, plus it’s supported by the German word for butterfly, Schmetterling, from Schmetten, “cream”—this dictionary entry has one more surprise for us all:
Another theory connects it to the color of the insect's excrement, based on Dutch cognate boterschijte.
“Huh,” I thought, upon reading that word. “That sorta looks like ‘buttershit.’”
Well, friends, I was not wrong.
Apparently butterfly shit looks sorta like butter? I was not aware. When I mentioned this Dutch connection to J, he proposed that perhaps people assumed butterflies stole butter because of the way their shit looks. (“As we all know,” he said, “when you eat something, it comes out looking exactly the same.”) Maybe! The whole boterschijte thing strikes me as far-fetched, and as I said above, usually the most boring etymology is the one to trust. Dutch also used to have botervlieg, which is more straightforwardly “butterfly,” and today it has vlinder, which is a whole other story. (Turns out the word for “butterfly” is a weird story in most languages!)
But I don’t know! We can’t and won’t ever really know. This little entomological-etymological journey is truly magical!
Anyway, next time you see a butterfly, I hope you all will think about butter and witches and/or poop. I know I will.
In Capital-R Romance, I read Baudelaire’s L’Œuvre et la vie de Delacroix (The Work and Life of Delacroix), which is a multi-chapter essay about the painter Eugène Delacroix, who was Baudelaire’s friend as well as the frequent subject of his art criticism. (You gotta imagine that’s an awkward situation for both of them.) Baudelaire wrote this in tribute to Delacroix after the artist passed away. I picked this up because the romance novel I’m currently drafting is set in France in the period when Delacroix reigned supreme, and one of the characters is an artist, so I thought I should refresh my memory of what people were saying about art.
It’s a lot of the usual Romantic (as in romanticism) stuff—praise for the individual imagination of the artist, who does so much more than simply copy nature, who feels such passion, etc. Not that it wasn’t fun to read! (This newsletter is full of hot takes like “Very famous French poet Baudelaire was, in fact, a good writer.”)
But the best parts were moments where you could really see that Baudelaire and Delacroix knew each other as people, like this beautiful, concrete detail:
…I have never seen a palette prepared as meticulously and as delicately as Delacroix’s. It looked like a cleverly arranged bouquet of flowers.
…je n’ai jamais vu de palette aussi minutieusement et aussi délicatement préparée que celle de Delacroix. Cela ressemblait à un bouquet de fleurs savamment assorties.
Bouquets come up again later when Baudelaire describes Delacroix as someone kind and polite who nevertheless wanted to dominate, “a volcanic crater masked by bouquets.” Baudelaire also compares Delacroix envisioning a painting to a tiger seeking its prey, which is great because Delacroix painted a lot of lions and tigers and they’re all wonderful. Here are some bad cell phone photos of studies of tigers in the Delacroix exhibit at the Met last fall:
This tiger is really going after her vision.
Look how floppy and flat they are. I bet these tigers were butter gremlins.
The second best part of the essay, after Baudelaire’s portrait of Delacroix, was a moment where Baudelaire quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson and then offhandedly referred to the whole transcendentalist movement as “the dull Boston school” (l’ennuyeuse école Bostonienne). Burn.
Technically I did not finish any small-r romance novels this week, but I did read Sierra Simone’s Feast of Sparks (m/m/m/f/f/f and all combinations thereof, erotica, fantasy, sequel to A Lesson in Thorns discussed previously here; content warnings for abusive families, parental death, murder, grief, and lots and lots of kinky sex).
Feast of Sparks is not a romance novel because its central emotional conflict does not resolve happily by the end— although I, a fool, live in hope that these doofuses will work their shit out—but it is a love story, and more to the point, a sex story.
Writing a sex scene is one of the most difficult things, partly because you’re always dealing with the weight of people’s expectations. Sometimes it feels like the world is divided into people who shudder to think that sex scenes exist and people who read them all the time (hello) and thus have exacting standards. Each of these groups of people has strong opinions about what is and is not acceptable.
(Good luck not thinking about all that while you write!)
It feels like romance-writer twitter is doing Sex Scene Discourse every other week (why are they there? can we justify them? are we proud of them or not? is okay to skip them when reading?). Then in the off weeks, we discuss which words are gross enough to jar us out of a scene (is “prick” sexy? what about “insert”? please god can we not discuss whether you personally are grossed out by “moist” I am so tired).
The truth is, if you can write a good enough sex scene—and Sierra Simone can—then the individual words don’t matter. I realize this is a strange position for this word-obsessed newsletter to adopt. Of course the words matter. But sex scenes are the ultimate literary gestalt. If you get most of the words mostly right, readers will enjoy the whole and stop paying such judgmental attention to the parts. (It’s how you use it that matters, you know.)
So how do you get most of the words mostly right? That’s a mystery for the ages, but I think it has something to do with individual characters and their emotions, and I know for sure Sierra Simone is good at it.
My other comment on Feast of Sparks, which also applies to A Lesson in Thorns, is that both of these books feel to me like Gérard de Nerval’s mid-nineteenth-century novella Sylvie, but with queer erotica instead of unrequited yearning. This is a strange and mostly useless comparison. Who the hell knows what Sylvie is? Here’s what it is: a story where the narrator, who may or may not be Gérard de Nerval, is in Paris and realizes he longs to go back to the little village in the countryside where he grew up so he can see a young woman he used to be in love with, Sylvie.
The village has a dreamy, out-of-time quality to it, as opposed to the narrator’s hurried modern life in Paris. The people there still practice the old ways—oral storytelling, country festivals that can trace their roots to pagan rites—and the narrator has lost touch with the old ways, and consequently, with the past. (Proust fuckin loved this shit.) He returns and is heartbroken to find that Sylvie has changed. She no longer makes lace by hand, but now uses a machine to do it. She won’t sing any of the old songs or tell any of the old stories for him. Modernity is encroaching on the village and folklore is disappearing.
The disappearance of folklore is an essential part of folklore. The scholar Alan Dundes called this idea “the devolutionary premise”: as long as there has been tradition, tradition has been fading away.
(You know how sometimes people start their advice on the internet with IANAL, I Am Not A Lawyer? Well, IANAF. I Am Not A Folklorist. I know some folklorists don’t like the devolutionary premise. Sorry for grossly oversimplifying everything in service of my weird comparison!)
Anyway, Nerval’s narrator yearns for Sylvie but can’t have her, just as he yearns for two other women who remain out of reach, one of whom is dead or possibly never existed. The whole of Sylvie is told in a non-linear, dreamlike fashion, so it’s hard to tell what’s real, and sometimes the narrator seems to purposefully blur one of his lost loves into the other. He’s in love with three unavailable women, just as he’s in love with an impossible, magical, unavailable past, and he reflects on all of that as he wanders around his former childhood home in the countryside, witnessing pagan rites.
Feast of Sparks is absolutely about being in love with multiple people, and trying to understand and revive a distant, magical past at your childhood home in the countryside, while performing a bunch of pagan rites. The rites themselves are so old as to be indecipherable. The villagers perform them as though they’re part of Christianity, but they used to be pagan, and before that, it’s hard to say where they came from—the origins are shrouded in mystery.
Thornchapel is shrouded in so many layers of history, it’s nearly impossible to say what a thing really is. The Victorian Guests were making romantic interpretations of medieval festivals which had trickled down from the original Guests—who’d stolen this place and its rites from the Kernstows. And who knows whom the Kernstows inherited it from? Who knows what came before them?
Druids? Something older than druids?
Everything we do is a tribute, an interpretation, an imitation, a copy of a copy. Traditions are always slipping away.
So anyway. That’s why I can’t stop thinking about Gérard de Nerval while I read these books that would have made his toes curl. (I mean, they make most people’s toes curl. That’s the point.)
And, in a roundabout way, the slipping away of tradition and folklore and the past is what leaves us with etymological questions like the ones surrounding “butterfly.” We’ll never know why we don’t all say flinder (a small piece, a splinter, a butterfly) as some English speakers apparently do. Instead we evoke—though the memory has faded for most of us—this little fragment of folklore about butter or witches or shit every time we say “butterfly.”
The past is mysterious and unknowable and—sometimes—hilarious.