Room For Butterflies?

 

                               Photo by Karina Vorozheeva on Unsplash   

Flibbertygibbet

Having used the word.  I decided to look it up in the Urban Dictionary. I was thinking in terms of a person who hopped from subject to subject or project to project according to whimsy.

I think maybe there is room in the world for us flibbertygibbets.  We see things in new ways, we make new connections and try stuff, to see if it might work. We do off kilter takes on normal life. We drive home a different way just to see how it feels to go that way, or because the Spirit said to and we find out later why.

We don't sit on the same darn flower until we die of old age.

We are dependably flighty!  

We are really good at finding lost stuff because we look in weird places for it.

We love you in ways no one else does, for we re-love you at each revealed facet of your personhood. We can do that.

What is the connection you ask?  Well, both are change agents, the butterfly getting its wings from metamorphosis and the flibbertygibbet just playing the changes.

flibbertygibbet
commonly spelled flibbertigibbet
1) A capricious and unreliable person.
2) a flighty or whimsical person, usually a young female.
3) Historically: a name for a fiend, devil, puck or sprite.
4) Mythology: The name of a particularly obnoxious
apprentice to the Wayland (Weland) smith who was
so irritated by his apprentice threw him down a hill where he was changed into a stone.
In "The sound of Music" Maria is called a flibbertygibbet by the Mother Superior because Maria is out roaming around the hills rather than staying in the convent and behaving as a novice should.
by roisinf November 23, 2009

Made for me by a girl I used to know.

That sounds about right.  I will look at etymologyonline.com also.

flibbertigibbet (n.)

1540s, "chattering gossip, flighty woman," probably a nonsense word meant to sound like fast talking; as the name of a devil or fiend it dates from c. 1600 (together with Frateretto, Hoberdidance, Tocobatto). OED lists 15 spellings and thinks flibbergib is the original.

I used to have a book that dealt in obscure, obsolete and forgotten English words used in this country.  Do you think I know where it is, or what it is called?  I do not.

It was fascinating to read words that have left the body of commonly used words, but that are obviously English words. 

PS.  I am one.  My terrifyingly productive second daughter is not!