What it means
A cheerfully grim British way of saying to die. One story has it that to pop meant to pawn, so popping your clogs, your last worldly footwear, meant you would not be needing them again. Death dressed up in a bit of working-class gallows humour.
Usage examples
"He swears he will keep working until the day he pops his clogs, retirement is just not in his vocabulary."
"My great uncle Bert popped his clogs at the ripe age of ninety-seven last Tuesday afternoon in the nursing home in Wigan, with the radio commentary of the Lancashire cricket match playing in the background and a half-eaten custard tart on the bedside table next to his framed photograph of Auntie Doreen."
"The old budgie of the family popped his clogs after twenty-three years of cage life in the corner of the lounge of the bungalow in Blackpool, and the cousin has now ordered a small marble plaque to install in the back garden between the gnome and the rose bush of the late grandmother."
Where it comes from
Pop your clogs comes from the nineteenth-century industrial north of England, where clogs were the standard footwear of mill workers in Lancashire and Yorkshire, and pop in Cockney rhyming slang meant to pawn at the local pawnbroker, also called popshop. The combination dates from the eighteen-eighties when the death of the household breadwinner left his clogs as the last possession to be pawned for the funeral expenses, and the gallows humour of the working-class community transformed the literal sequence into the figurative expression for dying. The phrase has retained the working-class cheerful resignation to the inevitable that characterises the best of British slang.
Other ways to say it
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