poor man's butter
- noun
- Informal
:
mantequilla de pobre
- During the war, people resorted to using margarine as poor man's butter.
Examples
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Peanut butter has long been considered the poor man's butter in many households.
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Many families use margarine as poor man's butter when butter prices rise.
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She topped her toast with avocado, calling it a poor man's butter.
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I often use poor man's butter on my toast.
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You can find poor man's butter in most grocery stores.
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During the war, people resorted to using margarine as poor man's butter.
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Peanut butter has long been considered the poor man's butter in many households.
Synonyms
148
1.0
A thick smooth or crunchy spread you make from ground roasted nuts for bread
20
1.0
A soft spread made from vegetable oil used instead of butter
How Expensive
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase combines literal elements ('poor', 'man's', 'butter') so a learner can infer something like 'butter for a poor person' — i.e. a cheaper or inferior version of butter (margarine, etc.). However, the use of the productive idiomatic pattern 'poor man's X' to mean 'a cheap substitute for X' is conventionalized and not fully predictable from the parts for all learners, so it is only partially transparent.
Etymology
Poor man's butter comes from times when real butter cost more than many people could pay, so they used a cheaper spread like margarine or peanut butter instead. The image is the 'butter' a person who is poor can afford, so today it means 'a cheap substitute for butter'.