One of the fun things from yesterday's family gathering was the presence of the twins. They are now two years old, and both of them are cuter than buttons! They are a joy to watch, and a bundle of energy, and so smart. In the photo below, Evelyn is using her mom's smartphone to take photographs, and she is a wizard at doing that! It is amazing to see her use the cellphone!
And here is Evelyn again, carrying her plate of sliced pears around in the living room. I love this photograph because of the high angle, which is different from how I normally shoot. Is she cute or what!
4 comments:
that cutie with the cellphone looks quite a bit like you mr spencer
Wow, that's funny! Funny how others can see family resemblances more easily than the subjects themselves! Thanks...
just so theres no misunderstanding, I meant that the little girls are cuties not you mr spencer ha ha ha
Hi Ken-
Your use of "cute as a button" made me wonder how/where the phrase started. I saved you the effort and looked it up myself!
CUTE AS A BUTTON - "cute, charming, attractive, almost always with the connotation of being small, 1868 (from the original 1731 English meaning of 'acute' or clever). Cute as a bug's ear, 1930; cute as a bug in a rug, 1942; cute as a button, 1946. Cute and keen were two of the most overused slang words of the late 1920s and 1930s." From "Listening to America" by Stuart Berg Flexner (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1992.)
Flexner may have an idea about the word "cute," but he provides no guidance on the question of how a button can be cute. The key to the issue is that it is not the button on a shirt that is meant here, but a flower bud seen in the popular name of small flowers, such as bachelor's button (q.v. "button" (n) in the OED, meanings 2 and 3).
The British version is "bright as a button". This makes sense if you think of a polished brass button. The phrase is really only ever used of small people - you'd say that a child, or maybe a small dog, was as bright as a button, but you'd never say it of a six-foot man. So the image is of a small sparky thing.
So there you go!
-Dean
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