Butterflies

I don't think of butterflies much.  Chopin wrote a nice piano piece called the Butterfly Etude, which was too hard for me to play.  An etude is a study piece that you play to improve your technique, but with Chopin's etudes you have to be an expert to play them in the first place! (I guess experts play them to stay experts.)

There's also the butterfly stroke in swimming.  I could actually do that stroke at one point, when I was about fifteen, but I haven't swum much for decades.

And there's Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly.  It's about a fourteen-year-old geisha who "marries" an American naval officer and has his baby, but he goes off and marries an American woman.  What a creep!  Butterfly waits for him to return, but when he comes back and reveals the truth, she commits hara kiri.  There's a nice Humming Chorus in it. (I performed in the chorus when the Toronto City Opera did it.)

Did you know that Stephen Leacock named his town Mariposa after the Spanish word for butterfly?  And the French word for bow tie, "cravat papillon," literally means butterfly tie!