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Buy the farm

verb, slang

Definitions

Verb

1
To die; generally, to die in battle or in a plane crash. US, euphemistic, idiomatic, informal
"You're just as dead if you buy the farm in an "incident" as if you buy it in a declared war."
2
pass from physical life and lose all bodily attributes and functions necessary to sustain life wordnet

Etymology

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.

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