A panda cub was born at the National Zoo early Saturday morning, and the rarity of the event (which was via artifical insemination) has led to intense media coverage. When lots of different media organizations gather together to cover what is a very limited subject, there is inevitably tons of overlap in the stories. In this case, strangely, the use of the phrase "stick of butter" to describe the newborn has appeared everywhere from the New York Times ("A newborn panda has the weight of a stick of butter") to the Los Angeles Times ("It's a giant panda cub no bigger than a stick of butter") to the Washington Times ("The cub is about the size of a stick of butter, officials said"). And that's just newspapers with the word "Times" in them.

This term probably came into general use from reporters taking notes from a page (PDF) on panda reproduction on the National Zoo's website, which states, "A newborn cub weighs 3 to 5 ounces and is about the size of a stick of butter." It's still absurd. Wonkette writes, "It's not exactly a common unit of measurement (except for butter), so perhaps editors could find another analogy that wouldn't make the baby panda sound quite so…
tasty." Meanwhile, the Washington Post's Style page suggests that the new arrival be named Parkay, adding, "Enough with all the comparisons to it being the size of a stick of butter. It's not butter, okay?"