Cute as a button: (adj) daintily attractive

I shall not take much time sharing my feelings about the phrase “cute as a button.”

I’m trying to imagine a time in our history when a button would have been considered cute.

I looked at buttons in my closet, and there was more commonality than attractiveness.

Is that the message? That once you reach the level of being a button—no matter how you got there or what you actually look like—simply by being a button and having gone through an appropriate struggle to achieve it, you are deemed cute?

Or maybe, back in an age when pulling corn, beans and wheat out of the ground was considered a miraculous, admirable feat, buttons might have been much more alluring.

Nowadays, if someone said something was “cute as a button,” a whole room of younger humans would roll their eyes.

How often do we use buttons?

• Velcro
• Zippers
• T-shirts
• Snaps

Could buttons be a dying breed?

And by becoming rare, are they cuter?

There is some charm in lowering the standard on what is cute. I’m still not sure if I could be included in the “button crowd,” but if we could change it over time to “cute as a fastener,” I might have a chance.