Butterfly

Swallowtail butterfly by Dominic Blair, Pixabay

It’s butterfly time of year and that got me thinking about how the word butterfly is pretty-sounding but distinct in the Romance languages - French papillon, Spanish mariposa and Italian farfalla. Papillon derives from Latin papilio. The etymology of farfalla is apparently obscure, possibly through Arabic/Maltese. Mariposa comes from the name Maria and the verb posar, to pose – alluding to the way butterflies pose when they rest/sunbathe. Delightful!

But where does the English word come from? The Old English buttorfleoge clearly comes from butter + fly. There are 3 theories – the least likely, thankfully is that it alludes to the colour of butterfly poo, based on the Dutch boterschijte! Surely not! There’s also the unimaginative possibility that butter refers to the pale yellow in butterflies’ wings. I reject that one as we have few yellow butterflies in the UK – only the brimstone and the migratory clouded yellow. My money’s on the theory that also accounts for the German schmetterling, due to an old belief that butterflies eat dairy products or even, more fancifully, that witches transform themselves into butterflies in order to steal butter and so on.

In English from c. 1600, the word butterfly was applied to people gaudily dressed. Butterflies in the tummy didn’t appear in English until 1908. And a century later, in 2008, the butterfly effect was coined. Edward Lorenz (MIT) created an early computer program to simulate weather. One day he changed one of a dozen numbers representing atmospheric conditions, from .506127 to .506. That tiny alteration utterly transformed his long-term forecast, a point Lorenz amplified in his 1972 paper, "Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?"

A charming serendipity about our word butterfly is that if you spoonerise it (is that a word?) you get flutterby.

I’ll leave you with the equally charming derivation of caterpillar. It comes via Old French chatepelose  from Late Latin catta pilosa, meaning shaggy/hairy cat. Shaggy/hairy I get, but cat? Huh?

Photo by Brett Hondow, Pixabay