24 June 2020
To buy the farm is military, especially U.S. Air Force, slang meaning to die, especially in an aircraft crash. That particular wording dates at least to the Korean War—it’s very likely older, perhaps dating to World War II, but older written uses haven’t been unearthed—but there are older formulations using the verb to buy that mean the same thing.
The earliest example of buy the farm that I’ve found is from the Memphis, Tennessee Commercial Appeal for 3 November 1952, in an article about jet combat in Korea:
Two of the MIGs had me wired for sound. Cannonballs were flying thick and fast. I thought I’d had it—bought the farm.”
The phrase is also glossed in a New York Times article on U.S. Air Force slang on 7 March 1954:
BOUGHT A PLOT: Had a fatal crash.
Another early example is from two years later, in the Los Angeles Times for 5 December 1955 in another article about air force fliers:
“Sure luck nobody bought the farm!”
Translated this means:
[...]
“Sure lucky nobody was killed.”
And it makes its way into the linguistics journal American Speech in May 1955:
BUY THE FARM; BUY A PLOT, v. phr. Crash fatally. (Jet pilots say that when a jet crashes on a farm the farmer usually sues the government for damages done to his farm by the crash, and the amount demanded is always more than enough to pay off the mortgage or even buy the farm outright. Since this type of crash is nearly always fatal to the pilot, “the pilot pays for the farm with this life.”)
While the definition given here is correct, the explanation is probably wrong, for reasons that will be made clear below. But we can’t dismiss the liability metaphor out of hand. We have examples of similar metaphors at play. One example of buy being used for liability for damages is this 1938 American Speech article on the slang of bus drivers:
BOUGHT A CAR (or TELEPHONE POLE, etc.) A driver is to blame for an accident.
More likely, however, the metaphor at play in the Air Force phrase is not a liability lawsuit, but rather the death benefit that U.S. military service people get if they die in line of duty. The idea is that the payment would be sufficient to buy the parents’ farm. Also, the inclusion of buy a plot in the American Speech entry militates against the liability explanation; plot is commonly used to mean a gravesite.
We have an example of the death benefit usage from World War II. The phrase buy the farm here is not a metaphor, but rather is quite literal. An Associated Press story of 26 April 1944 tells the story of Navy sailor Johnnie Hutchins who posthumously received the Medal of Honor for his actions during the invasion of Lae, New Guinea the previous September:
When young Johnnie was home the last time he had told the folks that if anything happened to him he wanted them to use the death benefit money to buy the farm. And so when the check from the Navy came last winter it went to make the down payment on the farm at Lissie.
This example would indicate that early uses of the phrase were likely to have been in all the services, not just the Air Force. The fact that we have no uses of the metaphor until almost ten years later, and all of those are in an Air Force, doesn’t strain credulity. Slang terms frequently go for decades before seeing print. It seems likely that buy the farm became a slang term during World War II and went unnoticed by those outside military circles until another war a decade later.
And both the liability and death benefit metaphors may be at play. A phrase can certainly represent multiple underlying ideas.
Furthermore, the form buy the farm is not the oldest use of buy in this sense. It has predecessors dating back over a hundred years.
The idea of buying death, or more generally a mishap, goes back to at least 1826—if not considerably earlier, as in the ancient myth of paying the ferryman to cross over to the other side. But it appears in that year in William Glascock’s Naval Sketchbook:
So you may suppose every man was at his gun in a crack; and never mind, in closing with Crappo [i.e., the French], if we didn’t buy it with his raking broadsides.
And buying it appears in the context of air combat in World War I. From Walter Noble’s 1920 With a Bristol Fighter Squadron:
A lucky shot might at any moment send us crashing to earth. How we got away without a scratch is a marvel. The engine was not damaged; but the wings and fuselage, with fifty-three bullet holes, caused us to realize on our return how near had been to “buying it.”
And buy it appears in the context of air combat during World War II. Hunt and Pringle’s 1943 Service Slang: A First Selection records:
He bought it, he was shot down.
And from the inter-war years, but presumably dating to World War I in oral usage, Fraser and Gibbons’s 1925 Soldier and Sailor Words have a more general, less deadly, use of buy in military slang:
To buy, to have something not desired, such as a job, thrust on one unexpectedly, e.g., “Just as he was going out, he ran into the Corporal and bought a fatigue.” [...] Another meaning: to be scored off or victimized. Of a man getting an answer to a question which made him ridiculous: “He bought it that time.”
That same source has buying a packet meaning to be wounded:
Packet, a bullet wound, e.g. it would be said of a wounded man:—He “stopped a packet” or “bought a packet”—i.e., got hit by a bullet. Also, any trouble or unexpected bad luck.
So, buying a farm is a variation on the much older buying it, based on either a metaphor of buying a burial plot or the parent’s farm with one’s military death benefit, perhaps influenced by the notion of the military’s liability for damages on the ground caused by crashed aircraft.
Sources:
Associated Press. “Parents Get Farm, Medal.” Philadelphia Inquirer, 26 April 1944, 2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Engler, Leo F. “A Glossary of United States Air Force Slang.” American Speech, 30.2, May 1955, 116.
Glascock, William N. Naval Sketchbook, second edition, vol. 1. London: Henry Colburn, 1826, 30. HathiTrust Digital Library.
Gray, Robert. “47 States Have Sent MiG-Killers to War.” Commercial Appeal (Memphis, Tennessee), 3 November 1952, 22. Newsbank: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. buy the farm v.
“Jet-Stream of Talk.” New York Times, 7 March 1954, SM20. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Miles, Marvin. “U.S. Fliers Wage Real Cold War.” Los Angeles Times, 5 December 1955, 21. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Morris, Bernard. “The Lingo of Bus Drivers.” American Speech, 13.4, December 1938, 308.
Nobel, Walter. With a Bristol Fighter Squadron. London: A. Melrose, 1920, 70. HathiTrust Digital Library.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989 with draft additions from June 2003, s.v. buy, v.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2005, s.v. packet, n. and adj.