[Ads-l] "kick the bucket"

[Robin Hamilton]

Stephen Goranson wrote:

<< I suggest that focus on the sense of "bucket" may mislead us. The verb "kick" v. 1 sense 1 b is already attested earlier as slang: "1725 New Canting Dict. Kick'd, gone, fled, departed."So, perhaps, left, departed life, or the job, or the vessel, or some other bucket-associated entity or image. "Bucket" adds (emphatic?) sound play after "kick," kick bucket.Perhaps compare 'kick off,' "kick up," "kick out," and maybe even the later "kick the habit." >> 

Unfortunately, the _New Canting Dictionary_ entry is based on the misreading of a word in “Frisky Moll’s Song” in the comic opera, _Harlequin Sheppard_ (1724).  The original phrase was “hiked away”, not “kicked away”.

I drew attention to this in a paper I gave at Oxford in 2012, "All's Boman! - the cant lexis in London in 1725":

“One last point about the first line of "Frisky Moll's Song."  When the author of The _New Canting Dictionary_ came to transcribe it, he misread the fourth line, where the original text has "my Boman he hick'd away," [glossed in _Harlequin Sheppard_ as "Her Rogue had got away"] as "kick'd away" (a reading which is followed by Farmer in _Musa Pedestris_). As a result, he creates a completely fictitious cant term in the body of his general glossary:

        KICK'D, gone, fled, departed ; as, The Rum Cull kick'd away, i.e. The Rogue made his Escape.”

( I go into this in more detail in the paper:  http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:0b7fdab3-0774-4b87-aa5d-ba0c4d1c9f1c )

Robin Hamilton

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