Mind Your Language | 19 October 2002

I’ve just got round to reading Liza Picard’s Dr Johnson’s London, which I enjoyed very much. She says, ‘As I read my way through contemporary writers, a few words caught my eye.’ Among them is kick the bucket. I wish Mrs Picard had mentioned where she saw it, for the earliest citation in the dictionary is merely from Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785), and he may well have read the phrase earlier.

Grose (c. 1731-91) was known as ‘a sort of antiquarian Falstaff. Immensely corpulent and jolly, he drank and joked his way round the British Isles, attracting a ‘rather coarse’ epigram from Burns, as the Dictionary of National Biography says. My copy of Burns gives this version, which doesn’t seem all that coarse. A note to it says that Grose ‘though he joined in the laugh, did not relish it’:

The devil got notice that Grose was a-dying,So whip! At the summons, old Satan came flying; But when he approach’d where poor Francis lay moaning,And saw each bed-post with its burden a-groaning,Astonish’d! confounded! cry’d Satan, ‘By God,I’ll want him, ere I take such a damnable load!’