Thoughts inspired by a comment by Robert Coren on my 3/6 posting “Checking out”, in which I responded darkly to the information from a grocery-delivery service that you can:
Add items until your shopper checks out
by understanding the intransitive phrasal verb check out in it not as the intended sense
To complete the procedure required in order to register one’s departure from a location or venue, esp. a hotel, at the end of a stay or visit. Also more generally: to leave, to depart. [OED‘s 1b for check out]
but as OED‘s 4a ‘to die’. RC offered a speculation on the etymology of the mortal sense of a different intransitive phrasal verb with out, peg out:
4a reminds me of a phrase that I encountered in Dorothy Sayers’ The Nine Tailors, where “peg out” is used as a colloquialism for “die”; I assume that (1) it comes from the process of being victorious in a cribbage game (which makes it a rather odd metaphor, actually), and (2) it was standard usage among some portion of the British population in the early 20th century.
Pegs in cribbage. From Wikipedia:
Cribbage … is a card game, traditionally for two players, that involves playing and grouping cards in combinations which gain points.
… Visually, cribbage is known for its scoring board — a series of holes … on which the score is tallied with pegs … Scores can be kept on a piece of paper, but a cribbage board is almost always used, since scoring occurs throughout the game, not just at the conclusion of hands as in most other card games.
Points are registered as having been scored by “pegging” along the crib board.
Then:
— AZ > RC: Puzzling. The OED entry for peg (revised in 2005) has intransitive peg out ‘die’ (slang, occurring in both Br and Am sources) from 1852 on, but without any speculation as to its source. (The OED’s cites aren’t helpful in this respect.)
Your cribbage idea is excellent, but other sources are imaginable — something to do with peglegs, for example, or pegs used in surveying and otherwise marking the boundaries of an area. Once again, we’d have to look at the textual and cultural contexts of a larger sampling of occurrences of the item. (The OED’s cites are merely a few representative examples of it.)
The travails of etymology. The peg out ‘die’ case is then an illustration of the difficulties of etymological research. Stories both plausible and ingenious are easy to come by, but supporting such speculations by evidence from the historical record (with an understanding of the cultural contexts) can be daunting and full of surprises.
Once you have seen some well-studied and rock-solid etymologies — like the one that has English silly as cognate with German selig ‘blessed’ — you might be prepared for almost any story, and the fact that there are some truly astounding word histories — I refer you to OK: The Improbable Story Of America’s Greatest Word by Allan Metcalf (Oxford, 2012) — might incline you to entertain just about any clever speculation as a possible etymology. But the sober lesson of Metcalf’s book (and some other equally remarkable examples) is that nailing an etymology down might take extraordinary research into very specific cultural practices at particular places and times. And that the further back in time we go the harder it is to find the textual evidence that will support or undermine a proposed etymology. Meanwhile, the more recent the usage, the more it might be subject to deliberate distortion and fabrication. (You could see these facts together as an argument that you’re screwed no matter where you look — historiography is just fucking hard, in the formulation of a (maybe fictional) historian I have heard quoted (maybe jokingly). Not impossible, just fucking hard.)
V + x ‘die’. An assortment of attested types.
V + Prt [particle], making a phrasal verb:
with Prt out: check out, peg out, drop out, go out
with Prt off: kick off (possibly from kick the bucket), shuffle off (surely from Shakespeare’s shuffle off this mortal coil)
with Prt on: pass on
with Prt away: pass away
V + it, making a VP:
kick it (from kick the bucket)
buy it (from buy the farm)
There is clearly no other way to bring this posting to an end than to quote scripture, in this case from Monty Python‘s first series, in the eighth episode (“Full Frontal Nudity”), which first aired 7 December 1969: a customer [John Cleese] at a pet shop, brandishing a dead parrot alleged by the shopkeeper [Graham Chapman] to have been a Norwegian Blue:
‘E’s not pinin’ [for the fjords]! ‘E’s passed on! This parrot is no more! He has ceased to be! ‘E’s expired and gone to meet ‘is maker!
‘E’s a stiff! Bereft of life, ‘e rests in peace! If you hadn’t nailed ‘im to the perch ‘e’d be pushing up the daisies!
‘Is metabolic processes are now ‘istory! ‘E’s off the twig!
‘E’s kicked the bucket, ‘e’s shuffled off ‘is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible!!THIS IS AN EX-PARROT!!
March 7, 2026 at 5:06 pm |
It’s surely from the railway signalman’s argot. To “peg off” or “peg out” is to return the signal to stop after the train has passed. The signal arm bounces back down on to its bracket. An oncoming train is “pegged” clear to proceed. Of course, it’s all done by computer now!
Enjoyed the reference to “Nine Tailors”, my favorite detective story, with Lord Peter’s impossible feat of ringing a record length on the church bells at short notice.
March 7, 2026 at 5:26 pm |
There’s no “surely” about it. A big assortment of verbs “to peg” is out there, and they’re all candidates. The one you thought of first, because it was familiar to you, has no special standing here. Other people have other favorites.
March 8, 2026 at 6:32 am |
I too greatly enjoyed “The Nine Tailors”, and indeed I am a fan of Sayers generally. However, I wish I had a clue what all the change-ringing jargon meant. A number of years ago I managed to obtain a copy of Stephen Clarke’s “The Lord Peter Wimsey Companion”, which purports to elucidate the variously obscure references in the Wimsey mysteries – and it does so to some extent, although its organization is non-optimal and its coverage is spotty – and I really hoped Clarke would cover the change-ringing terms, but apparently he is as ignorant of then as I (or he didn’t think it was worth the effort).
March 8, 2026 at 6:47 am
I have a hope (perhaps not forlorn) that someone has surveyed change-ringing terminology. Have you actually done a search for such a survey?
March 8, 2026 at 10:36 am
Even without external resources I learned a great deal about change-ringing from that book, just as I learned a lot about cricket from “Murder Must Advertise” (though there are a lot of resource for that), and less usefully, about how advertising was done in 1930’s England. I would add learning a lot about Oxford from that series in general, but especially from “Gaudy Night”.
March 9, 2026 at 12:50 am |
I have never looked into the etymology of ‘peg out’ meaning ‘die’, but I have always assumed that it relates to how someone has to ‘peg out’ the skin of an animal as part of the process of preserving the skin after killing the animal. I don’t know where or how I got the idea, and I make no claims to its veracity.
March 9, 2026 at 3:28 am |
Just to note that there are two claims here. One is that the stretching of an animal skin in taxidermy involves fastening it down with things that are conventionally called “pegs” (rather than, say, “nails” or “stops” or whatever) and that the stretching is then conventionally called “pegging out” the skin. I suspect (but do not know) that this claim is correct. In any case, it’s easy to investigate.
The other is the claim that this usage in taxidermy is the historical source of the use of “peg out” to convey ‘die’. For this we have no evidence whatever; it’s a good story, but so are half a dozen others. And it’s very hard to investigate this claim; historiography really *is* fucking hard.