School Butter

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi there, my name is Rose.

I’m calling from Lebanon, Virginia, down in Appalachia.

And I had a question relating to a phrase that my great-grandmother used to say.

Oh boy, let’s hear it.

Okay, so this started with her and has transferred to my grandmother and then to my mother.

The night before the first day of school each year, they would come into our rooms and sing school butter, school butter.

And we’ve never had an answer as to where this came from.

School butter.

S-C-H-O-O-L-B-U-T-T-E-R.

School butter.

You got it.

And were they laughing?

Yeah. Was this fun or taunting? What was this like?

It was more of like, get excited, school butter. It’s happening.

So this is four generations of women who’ve passed this down. Do you use this yourself now?

I do, actually, yes. And I use it in many different ways. I’ll use it for work or vacation.

I love it. Well, you might be further encouraged to learn that it’s got at least 350 years of history.

Oh, wow.

Yeah. So it does show up again and again in the new world in North America.

But the deep history of it is in the UK and Ireland, where originally it started with this idea of basically schoolboys beating on other schoolboys.

It was kind of a hazing ritual.

And the connection here is that in order to make butter, you have to beat it or whip it.

Right?

So it’s these multiple meanings of beat.

You are beating someone like you would beat cream to make butter.

Fascinating.

Yeah.

So what they would do is they would shout school butter, and it was the worst insult.

And if somebody shouted school butter at you, you would have to fight them.

You would have to take them off.

Oh, no.

One of the quotes says, this piece of discipline is inflicted in Ireland by the schoolboys on persons coming into the school without taking off their hats.

And it is there called school butter.

So there are a lot of different reasons that you might be victimized by school butter.

But here in the United States, it does show up again and again in Appalachia.

And there’s a rhyme from East Tennessee that’s a little more elaborate than what you sang to us.

It’s school butter, chicken flutter, rotten eggs for your daddy’s supper.

And there’s a wonderful footnote in this folklore.

And it says, it’s a cry of defiance to a boy who is disgraced by having to go to school.

Any schoolboy will fight anybody, no matter what his size, who calls school butter to him.

But it sounds like over the many years, school butter has lost some of that negative potency and has just become a fun rhyme.

Yeah, I’m curious as to how it’s transferred into that.

Well, you often find that linguists call it amelioration or semantic bleaching, where the potency of something, the potency of its connotations or denotations fade and all that’s left is kind of the form of it rather than the meaning or weight of it.

That’s fascinating. Okay.

So now you’re going to have to recite that whole poem.

School butter, chicken butter, rock next for daddy’s supper.

Well, I will have some very pleased long generation of women.

Yeah, absolutely.

Tell them 350 years of history going back to the deep folklore of the United Kingdom and Ireland.

Right. Fascinating. Wow.

All right. Well, take care of yourself and thanks for calling.

Thank you so much I appreciate it all right bye.