Kick the Bucket

Bucket: an open-topped, roughly cylindrical container.

Gambrel: a frame used by butchers for hanging carcasses.

— Collins Dictionary

When KFC founder Colonel Harlan Sanders died 40 years ago, a pal of mine joked, "He must have kicked the bucket."

Kick the bucket comes not from American chickens, but British pigs.

According to Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, a bucket is 18th-century British slang for a gambrel.

"When pigs are killed," Brewer's says, "they are hung by their hind-legs on a bucket, with their heads downwards. To kick the bucket is to be hung on the bucket by the heels."

Farmers (and city folk) would soon apply the gruesome expression to anyone who died.

The first known appearance of kick the bucket can be found in the August 1775 edition of The London Magazine: Or, Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer.

"My old mess-mate, Tom Bowline, met me at the gangway, and with a salute as hearty as honest, damned his eyes, but he was glad that I had not kicked the bucket."

Pictured above: A bucket. A gambrel.