Grant Barrett said
If you say, "He stuck his spoon in the wall," you mean that he died. In German, the person who's deceased has passed along his spoon, and in Afrikaans, he's jabbed his spoon into the ceiling. These expressions reflect the idea that eating is an essential part of life. An article in the British Medical Journal has a long list of euphemisms for dying, from the French avaler son extrait de naissance, "to swallow one's birth certificate," to the Portuguese phrase vestir pijama de madeira, "to wear wooden pajamas."
If you collect euphemisms for death, you should stop by the Usenet group alt.obituaries some time. An MSN article in 2008 led off with:
Every day in America, folks buy the farm. Some cash in their chips, kick the bucket, croak, bite the
dust. Others enter into eternal life, make their transition, go home to be with the Lord.
To which one of the AO regulars added:
And others are simply NLSTP.
That stands for no longer shopping the Pig, a phrase from an earlier death notice observing that the deceased would never again be seen at the Piggly Wiggly supermarket.
Five years ago this coming New Year's Day, a Polar Bear clubber in British Columbia drowned, from which obituary we extracted yet another colorful expression: kissed the inflatable octopus.
As noted by this search, a pipe culvert is some-times, -places called a whistle. Its intention is to pass water without intending to make a sound. That definition is not contained in the OxED.
With a couple in the low-water bridge below my dad’s house, this summer’s deluges has a whole different connotation on the concept of a clean whistle. I have had to clean their openings several times to aid the water flowing under the road rather than over the low-water bridge. Several times it was unsafe to cross and one should, “Turn around; Don’t drown.”
So, “clean as a whistle” means something entirely different in this context.