Kick, a pocket; Gaelic, CUACH, a bowl, a nest; Scotch, QUAIGH.
Kick, a sixpence; “two and a KICK,” two shillings and sixpence.
Kick the bucket, to die.—Norfolk. According to Forby, a metaphor taken from the descent of a well or mine, which is of course absurd. The Rev. E. S. Taylor supplies the following note from his MS. additions to the work of the East-Anglian lexicographer:—
“The allusion is to the way in which a slaughtered pig is hung up—viz., by passing the ends of a bent piece of wood behind the tendons of the hind legs, and so suspending it to a hook in a beam above. This piece of wood is locally termed a BUCKET, and so by a coarse metaphor the phrase came to signify to die.”
Another correspondent says the real signification of this phrase is to commit suicide by hanging, from a method planned and carried out by an ostler at an inn on the Great North Road. Standing on a bucket, he tied himself up to a beam in the stable; he then KICKED THE BUCKET away from under his feet, and in a few seconds was dead. The natives of the West Indies have converted the expression into “kickeraboo.”
Kick over the traces, to be over-extravagant. Any one who has come to grief by fast living is said to have KICKED OVER THE TRACES.
Kick up, a noise or disturbance.
Kick up, “to KICK UP a row,” to create a tumult.
Kickeraboo, dead. A West Indian negro’s phrase. See [KICK THE BUCKET], of which phrase it is a corruption.
Kickseys, or KICKSIES, trousers.