The candy bar by this name was one of my favorites when I was a youngster, but the term is described by the Phrase Finder as “A name playfully applied to someone who fails to catch a ball or lets something slip from their fingers.” I was surprised that Charles Dickens used the term in The Pickwick Papers written in 1836. “At every bad attempt at a catch, and every failure to stop the ball, he launched his personal displeasure at the head of the devoted individual in such denunciations of ‘Ah, ah! – stupid- Now, butter-fingers’.” The Phrase Finder points out there was reference to the term as early as 1615, when it was used to describe “…someone likely to drop things – as if their hands were smeared with butter, like a cook’s.”