‘Still I’m called Buttercup —poor little Buttercup,’ sang my husband in an inappropriate and displeasing baritone. Not wishing to encourage him, I simply said: ‘Darling, it’s butterbump.’
A furniture company called Loaf has been advertising ‘butterbump sofas’, supposedly named for their bringing out customers in a cross between goosebumps and butterflies. It doesn’t sound a very agreeable sensation. The sofas in question have buttons deeply indenting the upholstery in a quincunx pattern.
I suspect the sofa–marketing department hopes to charm shoppers with the word butterbump, just as some people take pleasure in serendipity and hagrid. But butterbump is no neologism. It exists as an old name for a bittern. Tennyson used the word in his strange poem ‘Northern Farmer: Old Style’, which in 1869 The Spectator praised most highly. The dying farmer remembers a ‘boggle’ in waste land making a noise ‘moäst loike a butter-bump’.
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