buy the farm

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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. Still another links it to a sardonic attitude of farmers that farms are often so heavily mortgaged and farmers' finances so difficult that one could not finish buying one's farm until one was dead.

13 source translations are retained for this English entry.

• Danish: tage billetten — to die
• Finnish: potkaista tyhjää — to die
• French: passer l'arme à gauche — to die
• French: casser sa pipe — to die
• French: avaler son extrait de naissance — to die
• French: calancher — to die
• French: passer de vie à trépas — to die
• French: crever — to die
• French: canner — to die
• German: den Löffel abgeben — to die
• Norwegian: skride hen til de evige jaktmarker — to die
• Polish: kopnąć w kalendarz — to die
• Portuguese: bater as botas — to die