Buttons are a big deal. Think about it — buttons jump into sayings more than safety pins, maybe even more often than needles. She’s cute as a button. All dressed up in her buttons and bows. Button your lip! Feeling unbuttoned.
Buttons are cute, little, precious, innocuous. Buttons are old or young — nobody over 24 or under 83 is cute as a button. Buttons are round, useful, everywhere you look, unnoticed, unimportant until you lose one. The best buttons are simple — if your winter coat has four buttons, each black and shiny with a blue rhinestone in the middle, and you lose one, and the coat-maker has not sewn an extra one into the lining, you are out of luck.
The Amish, the plain people, find buttons too worldly, too decorative, too proud — pins or hooks-and-eyes for them, they shun buttons. Nobody Amish ever says, “Cute as a button.”
If you lose your buttons you are nuts, but in a cute and inoffensive way. You bumble around, you are ditzy, you forget things. You lose your buttons in the same place you lose your marbles, probably. Losing your buttons is not as bad as not having a full deck.
“Buttons and Bows”— a song I always think is from "Annie Get Your Gun," though it’s not. Must be the part about “East is east and west is west.” Buttons and bows are East: prim, proper, fastened neatly, decorated. Annie Oakley, the gun-toting Queen of the West, did not wear buttons and bows with her fringed buckskins and her cowgirl hat. No buttons and bows for Annie!
Button your lip. Now, that’s a little gangsterish, right? I bet your mother didn’t say, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, button your lip!” It’s more Al Capone to Bugs Moran — not cute, curt. A lot more like “Shut up!” than “Please be quiet.”
Feeling unbuttoned — ahhh, that’s better. Feels good to be among friends, unconstrained, not too worried about being covered up. Undo a couple of buttons, let your shape slump or bulge, no need for caution.
Button, button, who’s got the button? Little buttons. Not so little. They keep our clothes on, which is often a good thing. They litter our junk drawers, and often, our conversations.
