butter-fingered

See also: butterfingered

English

Adjective

butter-fingered (comparative more butter-fingered, superlative most butter-fingered)

1. Alternative form of butterfingered
   • 1903, Guy de Maupassant, “The Artist”, in The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant: Ten Volumes in One, volume I, New York, N.Y.: P[eter] F[enelon] Collier & Son Corporation, →OCLC, page 164, column 1:

     Of course, one requires to be a little gifted that way and not to be butter-fingered, but what is chiefly necessary is patience and daily practice for long, long years.

   • 1906, Alfred C[ort] Haddon, “Sympathetic Magic”, in Magic and Fetishism (Religions, Ancient and Modern), London: Archibald Constable & Co Ltd […], →OCLC, pages 11–12:

     When a Land Dyak village has turned out for a wild-pig hunt in the jungle, those who remain at home may not touch water or oil with their hands during the absence of their friends, lest the hunters should all become ‘butter-fingered,’ and the prey so escape them [...].

   • 1961, Don Wilson Basham, “The Butter-fingered Fish Hawk”, in The Christian, volume 99, number 26, St. Louis, Mo.: Christian Board of Publication, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 711, column 1:

     One day this butter-fingered fish hawk was flying high over the island carrying a big, fat fish which suddenly slipped from his grasp.

   • 1997, Thomas [Carr] Frank, “Advertising as Cultural Criticism: Bill Bernbach versus the Mass Society”, in The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism, Chicago, Ill., London: University of Chicago Press, →ISBN, page 69:

     Even the jolly menials of the consumer world who were always romanticized in older advertising (the admiring butler, the compliant porter, the beloved Philip Morris bellboy) are lampooned in one 1970 American Tourister television commercial: a suitcase is tossed into a zoo cage, snatched up by a particularly violent ape who snorts and growls and smashes it about. Meanwhile, a placid announcer speaks of "savage baggagemasters," "clumsy bellboys," "brutal cab drivers," and "all butter-fingered luggage handlers all over the world." While in earlier spots such humble figures would have been rendered in friendly terms, here they are compared to apes.