I’ve frequently wondered as to what motivated the inept linguist or translator who turned the word “flutterby” into “butterfly”. That usually brings to mind (at least to my mind) the inept Catholic “saint”, Jerome of Stridon, who made a mess of his Latin translation of the Greek version of the Hebrew Tanakh. Poor Lucifer, demoted by the purported saint from the Roman god of truth and light into a rebellious archangel and the patron of evil (a role that belonged to a Hebrew “entity” whose name was Hel-El).
Flutterby is obviously the correct term to describe the fluttering, flying insect, often beautiful, that has nothing to do with butter but is stuck with that appellation. I don’t suppose Jerome was responsible, he knew nothing of English, but who knows. The absence of knowledge never stopped him.
And as to the “Latin” version of the Bible on which the St. James and other mistranslations are based, what can one say other than perhaps, …
… “Oy Vei”!
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved. Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.
Guillermo Calvo Mahé 
Poor Light-Bringer indeed.You might be interested in some of the writings of Daniel O. McClellan. He has a couple of websites (e.g. https://danielomcclellan.wordpress.com/), and contributes to a Facebook video channel where he takes on theological assertions, mostly by Christian Fundamentalists.His discussions remind me a lot of a story by a good friend and theologian (deceased) who recounted an experience of one of her elderly professors. A couple of young Fundamentalist Christians knocked at his door one day, and when he opened it, they started in on their “The Bible says” apocalyptic theology. After a bit, he invited them in, offered them some tea, and took them back to his study, where he pulled down a number of reference documents, including some in Greek and some in Hebrew, and walked them through a real lesson in Biblical theology. Then at the end, he looked at them kindly, and said, “So, you see, I suppose what you have told me COULD be true. But I really don’t think so.”
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excellent, thank you.
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