[Ads-l] go for a "Burton"--a 1944 etymology guess

[Stephen Goranson]

OED "Etymology: Origin unknown; perhaps connected with Burton n2 [the town].

In slang phrase to go for a burton, (of an airman) to be killed; (of a person or thing) to be missing, ruined, destroyed.

None of the several colourful explanations of the origin of the expression is authenticated by contemporary printed evidence. 1941...Go for a Burton, crash...." (It isn't always noted that this was also applied to inanimate things (e.g. an ammo dump exploding), hence not always to an airman, though it may have originated in the RAF.)


Here's a (pretty good?) etymology guess. At a minimum, it's relatively early.

"'The Door that Leads to Nothingness': Extracts from the letter of an officer serving in the Middle East" by Stephen Claude. Horizon: A Review of Literature and Art v. 9 no. 49 January 1944 [original paper] pages 48-52, here 50. This Staff officer got permission to take a parachute course. He describes "a most reassuring demonstration" of "manufacture and packing" of the parachutes. "Really there is nothing in the game at all!--given two essentials. (1) that the confounded thing opens, and (2) that you land without breaking your ankle, knee, ribs, collar-bone or neck. If the thing does not open, it is called 'a Roman candle' and you go for a 'Burton', which presumably is rhyming slang for 'curtain.'"


For a singular use of curtain n. 1 sense 2 d "the end" slang OED gives "1937 C. Day Lewis...I rather fancy potassium cyanide. You just chew a piece and quick curtain."


(As for potential secondary meaning or attestation of Burton, a correspondent may wish to mention an oral tradition, noted offlist.)


Stephen Goranson







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