Origin of “Buy the Farm”

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Eric. I’m calling from North Branch, Minnesota.

Hello, Eric, from North Branch. Welcome.

Welcome to the show. How can we help you?

I lost my wife about a year and a half ago, and thankfully she had an insurance policy. And because of that and Social Security, she is now supporting us better than I ever did as the sole wage earner prior to her getting sick.

And anyway, after she died, I started thinking about my situation and how it’s improved financially. And I thought about the term of someone, the old saying of somebody bought the farm. And I got thinking, where did that term come from? And I could have Googled it, and I thought I’d rather ask you guys and see what you thought about it.

Oh, I’m sorry for your situation, Eric. I’m glad to hear that you are not otherwise financially concerned. It’s good to have that taken care of.

Yeah, bought the farm. We have a lot of euphemisms for death, and it’s interesting. Probably in the last year you’ve encountered a lot of different ways that you’ve been talking to people about the way we’re uncomfortable just to point out, as you just did. And actually both Martha and I, I think, kind of reacted, just point blank said, I lost my wife, she died. Because we have all of these ways that we talk about death indirectly.

Yeah, tiptoe around it. We tiptoe around it. And bought the farm is one of the more jocular ways, typically, that we do it. You won’t find that in an obituary usually.

Right. There’s two theories behind this. One of them is that it came from around World War II, maybe 1940s or 1950s, when there was a lot of experimentation in high-powered jets and airplanes. And test pilots would sometimes crash on a farm, and then the government would pay a lot of compensation to these farmers. And in that way, it might be said that the pilot that crashed the plane bought that farm.

However, the problem with this is it sounds a little too perfect. And actually in the language trades, when we hear a perfect story like that, it’s almost always wrong, which kind of surprises people. And we also have older versions of this that have nothing to do with planes, like bought the plot or bought the shop or bought the telephone pole. If you had a car accident and you ran into a telephone pole, you might be said to have bought the telephone pole.

And even older than that, from the UK, there is to buy it. Like if someone dies, you might say, he bought it. He bought it in the fields of Flanders. That means he died there. And so more than likely bought the farm is just a reinterpretation of these older ones, including bought it. And it refers to the plot of dirt that we end up in if we’re buried. We literally buy a plot, a worm farm, so to speak, and that’s where we stay.

So it’s more of that. A very small farm that’s about six feet by three feet.

Exactly. Six by three and six deep, right? The reason I thought about it was because I thought, well, if somebody had an insurance policy and they were to die, that insurance policy could pay off the mortgage and that person could literally buy the farm.

Yeah. I was wondering if that was where it came from.

That has been speculated before. I’ve seen it in a couple of books of word histories where they have suggested that, particularly in the case of soldiers, when they got the check from the government after a soldier died, it came back to their parents or the spouse who was left behind, that then that would put them on a financial situation where they could literally buy their house or buy the back 40 or buy the garden plot that they’d always wanted.

But again, the problem with this is the etymological history of the related terms, and it’s a continuous kind of path, is much older than those stories. So the stories kind of come after the term was already ensconced one way or the other in the English language.

That makes sense to me.

Thank you. I appreciate it.

Yeah, sure. No problem. Give us a call another time. Let us know how everything’s turning out. All right?

Actually, everything is turning out pretty good. It’s as good as it can be.

All right. Good. Take care now.

Thank you.

You too.

Bye-bye.

Thanks, Eric.

Bye-bye.

If you’d like to talk about a word or phrase, call us 877-929-9673.