A butter-fingered person; esp. one who lets slip through his fingers a cricket-ball that he ought to catch or stop. (colloq., chiefly in vocative.)
1837. Dickens, Pickw., vii. At every bad attempt to catch, and every failure to stop the ball, he launched his personal displeasure at the head of the devoted individual in such denunciations as … now, butter-fingers, muff, humbug, and so forth.
1840. Thackeray, Misc. (1857), II. 375. When the executioner had come to the last of the heads, he lifted it up, but, by some clumsiness, allowed it to drop; at this the crowd yelled out, ‘Ah, Butter-fingers!’
1868. H. Kingsley, Silcote of Silcotes, III. vii. 123. I never was a butter-fingers, though a bad batter.
So butter-finger, attrib. (rare.)
1851. Fraser’s Mag., XLIV. 279. His ‘butterfinger’ fashion of taking hold of things.
