San Francisco 49ers

The San Francisco 49ers (also known as the Niners) are a professional American football team. The 49ers are currently a member of the Western Division of the National Football Conference (NFC) in the National Football League (NFL).

The name "49ers" comes from the name given to the prospectors who went west during the California Gold Rush which began on January 24, 1848, when gold was found by James W. Marshall at Sutter's Mill, in Coloma, California.

In the next year, that news brought some 300,000 people to California. The gold-seekers, called "Forty-niners" as a reference to 1849. Because of the gold rush, San Francisco grew from a small settlement to a boomtown, and roads, churches, schools and other towns were built throughout California. A state constitution was written and California became a state in 1850.


The 49ers official mascot is Sourdough Sam who wears jersey number 49. Before Sourdough Sam, the team's first mascot was a prospector's mule named Clementine that wore a red saddle blanket and appeared in the 1950s and 1960s.

Sourdough Sam is a gold rush prospector/miner who first appeared in the 1970s though he was based on a character that appeared on the covers of game programs created by William Kay between 1946 and 1949.

The "Sourdough" refers to sourdough bread which is associated with San Francisco.

Team owner Anthony J. Morabito chose 49ers for his All-America Football Conference squad because it reflected San Francisco’s link to the California Gold Rush.

The 49ers began to play in 1946 as a charter member of the All-America Football Conference (AAFC) and joined the NFL in 1950 after the AAFC merged into the older league.

The team was the first NFL franchise to win five Super Bowls.

The 49ers teams of the 1980s and early 1990s were a dynasty given their five Super Bowl triumphs in that span, including four in the 1980s. The Niners won 10+ games for 16 straight seasons.


Famous 49ers include three-time Super Bowl MVP Joe Montana, perennial Pro Bowler Ronnie Lott, all-time highest career quarterback rating holder Steve Young, and career touchdown leader Jerry Rice.

All of them played for the 49ers during their greatest period.

They have been division champions 20 times between 1970 and 2019, making them one of the most successful teams in NFL history.

The 49ers have been in the league playoffs 50 times (49 times in the NFL and one time in the AAFC).

In 2020, they played in Super Bowl LIV in Miami against the Kansas City Chiefs and lost with a score of 31 - 20.

Going South

The phrase "going south" to mean "becoming worse" is another one whose origin is not settled.

The most common origin attributes it to the standard orientation of maps. South is the downwards direction so things going south are going down. That would fit this type of usage: "Yesterday the stock market moved south, ending up on a loss for the day."

Another origin say that it was a euphemism used by some Native Americans for dying. "He was unconcerned that his health might go south."

This idiom always means that a situation becomes unfavorable, decreases, or takes a turn for the worse. "My luck went south."

Kick the Bucket, Buy the Farm and Bite the Dust

Most idioms don't make a lot of literal sense and so they often don't translate to other languages. In English, we have lots of ways of euphemistically say that someone has died. In this post, I'll consider three of them. Sometimes even the esteemed Oxford English Dictionary(OED) can't quite say definitively what the origin of a phrase might be. That's the case for the three in this post.

Why would we say that someone has "kicked the bucket" when they have died? One possible origin is that a person standing on a pail or bucket intending to commit suicide would put their head into the noose and then kick the bucket away.

Is that any more plausible than the archaic use of "bucket" as a beam from which a pig is hung by its feet prior to being slaughtered. To kick the bucket, was the term used to mean the pig's death throes.

Another origin that comes from the Catholic church is that at one time when a body had been laid out, a holy-water bucket was brought from the church and put at the feet of the corpse. When mourners came to pray they could sprinkle the body with holy water. I don't see any kicking involved in that explanation.

My favorite "kick the bucket" movie moment still comes in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. 

To "buy the farm" meaning to die is an American expression going back to the WWII and the Air Force.  At the time the similar "buy the plot" (as in a cemetery plot) and buy the lot were also used, but the farm survived.

A military pilot with a hit plane would often attempt to crash land in a farmer's field. If the crash destroyed some crops, the government paid reimbursement to the farmer, but if it was a really bad crash that destroyed most of the crops or buildings, the government would "buy the farm."

Then again, there are older British slang expressions "buy it," "buy one" or "buy the packet" that are supposed to be references to something that one does not want to buy.

The earliest citation of the 'bite the dust" is from 1750 by the Scottish author Tobias Smollett , in his Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane: "We made two of them bite the dust, and the others betake themselves to flight."

I also found a reference to a much earlier phrase "lick the dust" that is supposed to appear in the Bible.

Samuel Butler's 19th-century translation of Homer's The Iliad contains "Grant that my sword may pierce the shirt of Hector about his heart, and that full many of his comrades may bite the dust as they fall dying round him." But this is not Homer but Butler's use of the phrase.

And these are not all the euphemistic phrases for death. But we won't get into others like "to punch your ticket" or "meet your maker."

Another source of some interesting origins is Ballyhoo, Buckaroo, and Spuds: Ingenious Tales of Words and Their Origins by Michael Quinion