I just sent an e-mail message in which I reported that the geranium on the front porch "bought it" during the recent snowstorm in the Pacific Northwest. That got me to wondering: bought what? I have heard the expression "bought the farm" as a euphemism for human demise, but I don't know to what that refers, either.
I thought I read this on Quinion but I can't find it now. Assuming I didn't imagine the whole thing, the explanation given was that pilots in WWII used this as a euphemism for being shot down. The idea being that the presumably deceased had actually saved up enough from his salary to buy some land and settle down with a wife, which was why no-one ever saw him flying again.
Bingley
It'll be embarrassing to the Old Padre if you read it here, on AWAD, and I missed it when searching the board.
What I got in my Junk Drawer Memory® is that it derives from the notion that a sailor, back in the old days of the Rocks and Shoals, wnated nothing more than to get as far from the sea as possible, buy a farm and settle down. Hence the euphemism, 'he finally bought the farm.' But what with the history of these romantic sounding etymologies these days, I dunno. According to Dave Wilton the phrase 'buying it' predates the phrase 'buy the farm' by over a century:
http://www.wordorigins.org/wordorb.htm#buyfarm
Good Lord! It wuz me what started it last time, too. I guess whole pieces of my memory are deciduating.