12 July 2023
Actor Jimmy Durante about to kick the bucket in the 1963 film It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
While we have a fairly good record of the phrase’s early appearances, the metaphor underlying kick the bucket is uncertain. The phrase, of course, means to die, and it came into use in the late eighteenth century. It is still commonly used today and has generated at least one other common phrase, bucket list.
This sense of bucket probably comes from the Old French buquet, meaning a trébuchet or balance. The more familiar sense of pail is likely from the Old French buket, meaning a tub or pail. Shakespeare uses the buquet sense of the word, less familiar to us today, in Henry IV, Part 2 (III.ii.261):
Wil you tel me (master Shallow) how to chuse a man? care I for the limbe, the thewes, the stature, bulke and big assemblance of a man: giue me the spirit M. Shalow: heres Wart, you see what a ragged apparance it is, a shall charge you, and discharge you with the motion of a pewterers hammer, come off and on swifter then he that gibbets on the brewers bucket: and this same halfe facde fellow Shadow, giue me this man, he presents no marke to the enemy, the fo-man may with as great aime leuel at the edge of a pen-knife, and for a retraite how swiftly wil this Feeble the womans Tailer runne off? O giue mee the spare men, and spare me the great ones.
The imagery of on the brewers bucket here is of someone hanging pails or casks of beer or ale on a yoke on another person’s or persons’ shoulders. A gibbet is a gallows or a post on which a criminal’s body is hung following execution; Shakespeare here is verbing the noun. The line is in the context of Falstaff describing Thomas Wart, a recruit to the army, saying his thin and death-like appearance is ideal for the army because in the speed and heat of battle, he is too thin for a musketeer to actually hit.
So by the end of the sixteenth century we have the literary metaphor of a bucket being associated with death by hanging.
And at around the same time, the following entry appears in John Florio’s 1598 A Worlde of Wordes, an Italian-English dictionary:
Dar de'calci a Rouaio, to be hang'd, to kicke the winde.
The Italian literally means to kick the north wind, rovaio being a dialectal word for the north wind. While the Oxford English Dictionary, in an old entry in desperate need of revision, includes this as an English usage, it seems that Florio was simply translating the Italian phrase, rather than recording an English one. And other than appearing in a few other eighteenth-century Italian-English dictionaries translating the same phrase, the phrase kick the wind, or something similar, does not appear in English again until the nineteenth century.
We do, however, see kick the bucket in the late eighteenth century. The following passage appears in Edward Thompson’s 1775 History of Edward and Maria:
My old mess-mate, Tom Bowline, met me at the gangway, and with a salute as hearty as honest, damn’d his eyes, but he was glad I had not kicked the bucket; while another swore roundly, that I had turn’d well to windward, and left death and the devil to leeward; and a third more vociferously exclaimed, I was born to dance upon nothing.
Not only is this the first instance of kick the bucket that I’m aware of, but the passage also includes dance upon nothing, yet another example of a metaphor relating to the flailing and kicking of a hanging man’s legs.
Five years later, the same magazine published the following in its May 1780 issue:
I should have been at a loss also to have known the significance of kicking the bucket, but am told it is an expression used to inform us of a person’s death, although I should no sooner apprehend it to be so than if I were told he had let fall his watch, or rapped at my door.
Francis Grose includes kick the bucket in his 1785 Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. And the following entry appears in the 1811 Lexicon Balatronicon, a later update of Grose’s dictionary:
TO KICK THE BUCKET. To die. He kicked the bucked one day: he died one day. To kick the clouds before the hotel door; i.e., to be hanged.
So, kick the bucket was in common use by the 1780s.
Again, we see the collocation of both kick the bucket and another similar metaphor, kick the clouds. But the original metaphor underneath kick the bucket is unclear to us today. There are two plausible explanations. The first is that it might have originally referred to a suicide standing upon a bucket or pail and then kicking it away, allowing themself to drop. Supporting this explanation is this item from the London Chronicle of 26 September 1788:
Last week, John Marshfield, a labouring man, hanged himself in an out-house in Avon-street. He had very deliberately just before bought a piece of cord, which he put round his neck, and by standing on a bucket fixed it to the beam; he then kicked the bucket to a considerable distance from under him, and was found soon after.
Note that kick the bucket was already an established phrase by the time this incident occurred, but similar incidents could have inspired the phrase, or it could simply be coincidence. Militating against this explanation are the earlier citations of the phrase’s use which are unrelated to suicide.
The other plausible explanation is that it is conflation of a literary reference to Shakespeare’s brewer’s bucket with kick the wind or kick the clouds. We just don’t know, nor are we likely to know. It would seem to be lost to the ages.
Two other explanations are commonly proffered, which we can dismiss. One has the phrase referring to a hanged person kicking at the post from which they were hanged, but this seems unlikely as this would be impossible on a typical gallows where the person would be suspended from a crossbeam. The other is that bucket refers to a gibbet on which a dead person or animal might be strung upside-down, but in that case, they would be dead already and highly unlikely to be kicking anything.
Jumping forward to the twenty-first century, we see kick the bucket give birth to the phrase bucket list. This phrase is one of those that was invented by the movies. It comes from the 2007 Rob Reiner film The Bucket List. While the film was released in 2007, the phrase starts appearing in the press the previous year in anticipation of the movie’s release. Here is a United Press International report from 29 June 2006:
Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman are set to star in “The Bucket List,” about two cancer patients who break out of a hospital and head for Monte Carlo.
The two terminally ill men make a wish list of things they want to do before they kick the bucket—called the bucket list—then take a road trip. Their adventures include racing cars, eating massive amounts of caviar and playing high stakes poker, Daily Variety reported.
And like kick the bucket, one will occasionally see the underlying metaphor of bucket list being reanalyzed into a less morbid one where the bucket is a pail or container for the things one wishes to accomplish in life. As in the earlier phrase, the bucket was originally associated with death.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
Sources:
Florio, John. A Worlde of Wordes. London: Arnold Hatfield, 1598, 96.1. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2023, s.v. kick the bucket, v.
Grose, Francis. A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. London: S. Hooper, 1785, 20. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
London Chronicle, 26 September, 307. Gale Primary Sources: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Collection.
Lexicon Balatronicon. London: C. Chappel, 1811, Sig. I2v. Wellcome Collection.
“Observations on the Errors and Corruptions that Have Crept into the English Language.” The London Magazine, May 1780, 202. HathiTrust Digital Archive. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.hxueqk&view=1up&seq=220
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. bucket, n.2, kick, v.1., gibbet, v., gibbet, n.1.; draft additions September 2013, s.v. bucket list in bucket, n.2.
Quinion, Michael. “Kick the Bucket.” World Wide Words, 5 March 2016.
Shakespeare, William. The Second Part of Henrie the Fourth (quarto). London: Valentine Simmes, 1600, sig. F2v. London, British Library, C.34.k.12.
Thompson, Edward. “The History of Edward and Maria.” The London Magazine. Or Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer. August 1775, 408–09. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Tréguer, Pascal. “The Authentic Origin of the Phrase ‘To Kick the Bucket.’” Wordhistories.net, 3 January 2017.
United Press International. “Nicholson, Freeman Team Up in Reiner Film.” UPI.com, 29 June 2006. Nexis-Uni.
Photo credit: Clip from a still frame from Stanley Kramer, dir., It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, United Artists, 1963. Fair use of a portion of a single frame from the film to illustrate the topic under discussion.