fly in the buttermilk

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English

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Noun

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fly in the buttermilk (plural flies in the buttermilk)

  1. (colloquial) A black person in a predominantly white group of people.
    • 2008, Bernestine Singley, When Race Becomes Real, page 108:
      You can do the same in parts of Ward Three and see black folks sprinkled like “flies in the buttermilk.” Two Districts of Columbia, two different realities.
    • 2012, Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, Dorothy West's Paradise: A Biography of Class and Color, page 38:
      Once on-island, the black colony did not want to be reminded by whites or blacks of the racial divisions that existed “off-island.” Visitors did not want to be flies in the buttermilk []
  2. Synonym of fly in the ointment (something that spoils something else)
    • 2013, Lewis P. Hussell, A Commentary on Amos, Ezra, Esther, Haggai, Nehemiah, page 246:
      Discovery of this document was a fly in the buttermilk of Tattenai.
    • 2016, John Green, The Wind in the Junipers:
      As life has a way of doing sometimes, just when things are going well, something comes along and puts a fly in the buttermilk. Two things happened in 1905 that changed things a lot for me. First off, the hotel burned down.