buy the farm

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.

• "You're just as dead if you buy the farm in an "incident" as if you buy it in a declared war."
• "Then tracers laced the sky in front of me. Forget the shooting! If I get distracted now, I'll buy the farm anyway!"
• "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."
• "They gambled with as much reckless abandon as they flew their airplanes. They knew they might buy the farm tomorrow."

• buy it
• buy the plot
• buy the ranch
• buy the big one
• kick the bucket
• punch one's ticket
• meet your maker

• bet the farm