Buckets and spoons: an etymological tour of death metaphors

The need to translate English into English is more common than you might imagine, where phrases of English are deployed in a foreign language and have taken on an alternative meaning that isn’t appropriate in actual English text. There are lots of examples where the meaning has diverged completely from the original and becomes metaphors, but sometimes the distinction is more subtle and I recently came across a new example in a German text that prompted not just careful contemplation of the correct translation, but a fascinating etymological tour of discovery. The text involved marketing materials describing customers’ “Bucketlist für den Frühling” literally bucket list for spring.

The first thing that struck me was amusement that this rather English term had infiltrated German vocabulary. A quick search of German websites dug up a fair few examples, and the term has its own Wiki entry explaining its origins. This definition captures the original two-word phrasing and correctly points out the link with the English phrase kick the bucket, meaning to die. The phrase bucket list is intended to capture things an individual wants to do or achieve during the rest of their life, i.e. before they kick the bucket.

In English, a bucket list can certainly be used in a fairly frivolous way to describe a list of things you want to do, but it also has a definite sense of “life goals” rather than “stuff I fancy doing in the next few months”, which is why I found the idea of a “bucket list for spring” rather odd. I came to the conclusion that German readers must not have the same association between this phrase and impending demise, leaving them instead with something much closer to the simple English “wish list”. And indeed that was the translation I ultimately settled on.

Like all the best translation deliberations, this one led to a couple of intriguing etymological investigations. Firstly, we have a range of competing and disputed theories about the origins of kick the bucket. One gruesome suggestion is that bucket refers to the beam from which slaughtered pigs were suspended, and that kicking the bucket describes the pig’s ensuing struggle while in its death throes. A barely less grisly explanation is put forward in a 19^th century slang dictionary describing a bucket being kicked away during the process of someone hanging themselves.

Perhaps even more intriguing is the German equivalent “Löffelliste” (spoon list), derived from the German phrase “den Löffel abgeben” (to hand in your spoon). I found one source claiming that Löffelliste is a calque of the English bucket list, but since a calque usually describes the translation of a phrase word for word, it isn’t clear why bucket has been replaced by spoon here. As so often in etymology, competing theories are readily available. A German wiki entry claims that in the Middle Ages, having your own spoon was an essential accessory, so would have been carried everywhere with you, hence giving up your spoon meant giving up on life itself.

Whatever the phrase’s origins, I am rather charmed by the whole spoon metaphor, so I plan to work on my own calque and start deploying the English version “to hand in your spoon” at every opportunity.

About the Author

Alison Tunley

Alison is a seasoned freelance translator with over 15 years of experience, specialising in translating from German to English. Originally from Wales, she has been a Londoner for some time, and she holds a PhD in Phonetics and an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her First Class BA degree in German and Spanish… Read Full Bio

Image: Unsplash