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)

(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

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)

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