She Kicked The Bucket!

So really, i always wondered where some sayings come from.  For example: "You're the apple of my eye!" because who wants an apple in one's eye. Or to "Fly by the seat of your pants"  now really, one cannot fly with the use of our buttocks, we don't have wings down there. And how do they evolve to mean something so truly different then perhaps they were meant to mean in the first place?  Like - "She kicked the bucket!"  which has evolved to mean, 'she died.'  So really, have sayings like this come from an actual experience?  Because if they have i totally understand the meaning of "She kicked the bucket."

Today, as many other days when milking a goat, they get anxious.  Or the grain has run out of the feed pan, or they are new to milking and prefer not to be up there on the milking stand while you touch one of their very private areas.  Or they just are not in the mood that day. My most challenging aspect of milking is to be able to TIME the ending of the final milk stream from the teat with the final bite of grain from the feed bin. Over the years i have mastered this, to a point: sometimes factors have to be taken into account about length of time between milkings: if you milked late the day before, then there will be less milk in the teats the next morning and vice a versa, or if a family member who was asked to milk for you because you were not going to around come milking time, forgets to milk - then you've added on a little more time at the milk stand. But once mastered, you can pretty well time it down to the last drop, if you so choose such phrase. But if you don't time it perfectly, or if one of the above named factors such as they are not in the mood ~ they will kick the bucket!  And gosh darn it!  If that doesn't piss you off nothing else will in life!  Because it always is at the very last minute and when the bucket is almost completely full and the mess is the largest it could possibly be!  So ~ my philosophy about this saying ended up meaning, 'she died' comes from the fact that i can imagine a farmer, milking away, and at the last second, the goat kicks the bucket, spilling the milk, and s/he gets so angry that the next day - the doe is goat meat!  This must be the answer!

The real answer is: The link between buckets and death was made by at least 1785, when the phrase was defined in Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue:

"To kick the bucket, to die."

One theory as to why, albeit with little evidence to support it, is that the phrase originates from the notion that people hanged themselves by standing on a bucket with a noose around their neck and then kicking the bucket away.

Now really, i love my goats, they are amazing and just to prove it i will share this with you. This is something i found from another blog one day - sorry i can't remember where or i would give them credit because this is so true:

Top 10 things I learned from my goats:

10. Don't butt heads with anyone who has bigger horns.

9. The grass is always greener when someone else cuts it, bales it, and totes it over to where you're already lying down.

8. Better the same old milking hands every day than getting used to a whole new set of callouses.

7. If you're not sure about something, go ahead and taste it. You can always spit it out.

6. The manure may pile up in the winter, but it keeps the barn warm. Sometimes it's just one sh*tty trade-off after another.

5. If there is someplace to stand around and do nothing that is higher up than the current place you're standing around doing nothing, it's worth the effort to move.

4. If everyone else is running away in the same direction, join them now, ask questions later.

3. Getting mud between your toes is not as poetic as people make it out to be. Better to stay out of the rain in the first place.

2. There's no better pillow than someone else's tummy.

1. Fences are mere suggestions.

Animals create the best metaphors for life!