buy the farm

English

Etymology

Not known with certainty. Two long-held hypotheses are as follows: One describes combat soldiers wistfully wishing to go back home, buy a farm, and live peacefully there; later, after they had been killed in combat, their fellow soldiers would say that they had bought the farm (compare the established metaphor pattern of having gone to that big [whatever sort of nice place] in the sky). Another links the phrase to the idea that governments compensate farmers whose land is damaged by a military aircraft crash; a deceased pilot was thus said to have bought the farm, and the term eventually entered wider use.

Pronunciation

• Audio (General Australian):

  (file)

Verb

buy the farm (third-person singular simple present buys the farm, present participle buying the farm, simple past and past participle bought the farm)

1. (idiomatic, US, informal, euphemistic) To die; generally, to die in battle or in a plane crash.
   • 1959, Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers‎^[1], page 131:

     You're just as dead if you buy the farm in an "incident" as if you buy it in a declared war.

   • 1984, G. Harry Stine, Manna‎^[2], page 221:

     Then tracers laced the sky in front of me. Forget the shooting! If I get distracted now, I'll buy the farm anyway!

   • 1995, Steve Allen, “Having a Good Time”, in Ann McDonough, Kent R. Brown, editors, A Grand Entrance‎^[3], published 2000, →ISBN, page 212:

     BETTY. Shoot, if I knew you was gonna buy the farm I coulda asked for everything you got in the world... How were you gonna do it? ¶ROGER (takes revolver out of briefcase). With this.

   • 2002, W. Barry Baird, Vietnam Journey‎^[4], →ISBN, page 171:

     They gambled with as much reckless abandon as they flew their airplanes. They knew they might buy the farm tomorrow.

Usage notes

• This idiom is most often found in its past tense and past participle form bought the farm.

Synonyms

• buy it
• buy the plot
• buy the ranch
• kick the bucket
• punch one's ticket
• meet your maker
• See also Thesaurus:die

Translations

to die

• Danish: tage billetten
• Finnish: potkaista tyhjää (fi)
• French: (informal) passer l’arme à gauche (fr), (informal) casser sa pipe (fr), (informal) avaler son extrait de naissance (fr), (colloquial) calancher (fr), (formal) passer de vie à trépas (fr), (derogatory) crever (fr), (derogatory) canner (fr)
• German: den Löffel abgeben (de)
• Norwegian: skride hen til de evige jaktmarker
• Portuguese: bater as botas (pt)

See also

• bet the farm

References

• Michael Quinion (2004) “Buy the farm”, in Ballyhoo, Buckaroo, and Spuds: Ingenious Tales of Words and Their Origins, Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books in association with Penguin Books, →ISBN.
• http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-buy1.htm

• Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck