If there's one thing we're great at euphemizing, it's death. To many, there's a natural discomfort to talk about it, so it makes sense that we'd find ways to soften the topic, but from "kicking the bucket" to "pushing up daisies", we've adopted countless ways to describe the ultimate act of shuffling off this mortal coil, and many more idioms that evolved from death to now describe everyday things. As we've been working on our daily word game, we’ve been looking more deeply into many of these expressions, and realized how often we use death-related idioms without pausing to think about what they really mean or where they came from. Here is a quick run down of some of the more common ones we've seen used in everyday language:
This one sounds so harmless (almost silly) but it is actually one of the more visceral ones: it likely comes from the world of animal slaughter. In older English, "bucket" was said to refer to a wooden beam or yoke that was used to hang animals by their feet before slaughter. As the animal struggled and thrashed the animal was described as “kicking the bucket.” Some alternative theories point to people standing on actual buckets to hang themselves and when they “kicked the bucket” away, that was the end. The idiom first appears in print around 1785 in Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, which defines it plainly as “to die.”
Further popularized by Queen in the '80s with their song of the same name, this phrase has much older roots. It’s believed to stem from ancient battlefields, where retreating soldiers would quite literally fall face-first into the dirt as they were overcome by their assailaints, their mouths clenched or screaming giving off the image of one chewing on the dust kicked up on the battlefield. Similar language appears in biblical texts and Homeric epics. For example, in The Iliad, warriors are often described as falling and “biting the dust” in defeat. In Psalm 72:9, it says: “They that dwell in the wilderness shall bow before him; and his enemies shall lick the dust.” What began as poetic language for violent death evolved into a flippant phrase we now use when someone loses a game or heads home early from a night out.
Another more gentle-sounding phrase, this one, perhaps more obviously, describes the decomposition process: the idea that one’s buried body nourishes the soil, providing the much-needed fertilizer to cause flowers to grow. It’s a folksy way of saying someone is dead and buried, with printed usage dating back to the early-to-mid 1900s (though similar phrasing may have appeared earlier in regional dialects) and said to have gained greater popularity during the world wars when talking of death had a dramatically increased relevance for many.
Another idiom born from war times, this one has a few theories around its exact origins, but they all seem to revolve around the US Air Force coming out of WWII. The first documented appearance in print comes from the journal American Speech in 1955, where it was used in a military aviation context to say “The pilot bought the farm during a training exercise", though, by then, it was likely already well-established in oral military slang among Air Force pilots. There are three main competing theories for how it came into to use. The first commonly refers to how, when a military pilot died in a crash, the U.S. government might pay a death benefit to the family, and sometimes that death benefit was enough to pay off the mortgage (or “buy the farm”) back home. The second, slightly more whimsically, was thought to emerge from how Air Force pilots would talk about wanting to get back home after the war to settle down, maybe buy a farm, and live a simple life, so the saying would go once they died in battle, they were released from duty, free to "buy the farm" back home. And the last (less sentimental and more literal) theory comes from the image of a fighter jet literally crashing into a farm, in which case the military might have to compensate the farmer for the damage, in some cases even purchasing the land. In that sense, the pilot quite literally “bought the farm” with his final act.
A little different here, as this idiom technically speaks to the act of being saved just before an unfortunate turn of events, but one of the prevailing theories for its origin has one of the more macabre beginnings. Though many assume it comes from boxing (and it might), with the fighter being saved frome knockout by a well-timed bell to end the round, an older, more disturbing theory involves premature burial. In the 18th and 19th centuries, there was a widespread fear of being buried alive as doctors were not yet able to confirm death accurately. Inaccurate instruments and readings of heartbeats led to mistakes and many premature burials. These stories led to the invention of “safety coffins” and "death halls" where bodies were left for 2-3 days before burial to confirm death. These safety coffins were equipped with strings tied to bells above ground. If someone revived underground, they could pull the cord and ring the bell, literally being “saved by the bell.” Graveyards even hired overnight watchers for this purpose, hence the phrase “graveyard shift” (another nifty idiom that fits into the theme). It’s debated whether this directly influenced the idiom, but the timing lines up as the idiom appears in print around 1893.