Butterfly-collecting: The history of an insult (2017) (lughat.blogspot.com)

The article traces how the metaphor “butterfly-collecting” (and earlier “stamp-collecting”) was used to disparage descriptive, data-gathering work in linguistics and other fields. It reviews the quote’s shifting attributions—from an alleged Rutherford remark, to anthropology and rhetoric—and shows how it later became associated with Chomskyan critiques of descriptive approaches. The author argues that the insult’s spread reflects broader 20th-century disciplinary tensions about what counts as “real” science.