The struggle through Week Five may be over, but that doesn’t mean it was always easy. Buried under essays, worksheets, and the desire for that oh-so-elusive sleep, perhaps you felt at time that it was all too much and you might just kick the bucket. I’m sure I’m not unusual in the fact that I don’t actually own a bucket, so why would I kick one if I were to die?

There’s an obvious, if rather grisly, explanation for where this phrase might come from. Many people assume that it’s a reference to hanging, both as a method of suicide or execution. The idea is that the person being hanged might be standing on a bucket, which would then be kicked away, causing the noose to tighten and the victim to die. In this way, kicking the bucket and dying might become synonymous. Closer inspection, however, suggests that this link was created after the phrase came about, rather than before. The idiom ‘to kick the bucket’ is recorded as early as 1785 in the Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, and is defined simply as ‘to die’, with no reference to hanging or executions. It’s only later, in a slang dictionary of 1823 by John Badcock, that the link is made with the notion of a bucket being kicked away in the hanging process. It seems more likely that this explanation was created afterwards and that it wasn’t actually the real reason the phrase came about.

In a much less grim turn of events, another suggestion is that it has its origin in goats. There’s a Latin proverb, capra scyria, which describes a goat that kicks over the bucket containing its milk after it’s been filled. Andrea Alciato, an Italian writer, wrote in a Latin poem that this process is the same as spoiling one’s ‘fine beginnings with a shameful end’. The idea is that you take something that starts out promising – a full bucket of milk – and then ruin it with your own clumsy actions, as the goat does by spilling the milk. Obviously, this doesn’t really directly relate to death, but there’s a reason for that. This theory holds that the phrase actually originally described the process of destroying a carefully-cultivated reputation with a foolish action, rather than the destruction of a life, and that it was only a gradual process over time that led it to describe an actual death. An interesting idea, perhaps, but it’s not usually seen as a very plausible one.

“It’s generally accepted that it comes – as with so many idioms – from the nasty treatment of animals”

Alternatively, it might all come from an old Catholic custom after death. A body would be laid out with a bucket of holy water placed at its feet, and then people who had known the deceased would be invited to come and pray over the body. Traditionally, they would also use water from the bucket at the corpse’s feet to bless the body. ‘Kick the bucket’ therefore might refer to having a bucket of holy water at your feet so that your dead body can be blessed. This seems yet more plausible when combined with a Spanish idiom for death. The Spanish phrase ‘estirar la pata’, which means to stretch one’s leg, is a euphemism for ‘to die’, arising from the tendency in death to stretch the legs. This would lead to the bucket placed at the feet being kicked as the legs stretched – though, of course, the bucket wouldn’t actually be placed there until some time after death. Nevertheless, it’s possible that our phrase came from a conflation of these two phenomena. The Right Revered Abbot Horne in his book Relics of Popery states that it is only people ‘unacquainted with Catholic custom’ who try to explain ‘kick the bucket’ in any other way.

In fact, though, the idiom is thought to have derived most likely from a practice associated with the slaughter of pigs. The word ‘bucket’ used to describe – and still does in Norfolk dialect – a beam that can be used to hang things on, coming from the French ‘trébuchet’ or ‘buque’, meaning balance. Pigs that were going to be slaughtered might be hung by their legs from such a beam before being killed, and if they struggled on the beam, it was likely they would end up kicking it. This led to an association between the notion of death and the idea of kicking the bucket, and it’s certainly an old enough practice to account for the early appearance of the phrase in the Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue.

Word Up: feeling blue

As much as it would be nice to think that we’re actually talking about mischievous goats when we say ‘kick the bucket’, it’s generally accepted that it comes – as with so many idioms – from the nasty treatment of animals. It might not be from the Latin, but at least we’re brightening up our language with a little Norfolk dialect every time we use this phrase