From the Grim Reaper -- Kicking the bucket

I'm not really the Grim Reaper, but I play one as a storyteller, so I've done a lot of research on euphemisms for death. They are typically very hard to pin down as to origin and/or meaning. "Kick the bucket" might relate to being hanged or hanging oneself, standing on an overturned bucket, or maybe it's about hanging up slaughtered pigs to drain the blood. I thought I knew about "buying the farm," as a wartime term. If a soldier was killed, the death benefits to beneficiaries of soldiers would probably help his parents pay off the mortgage on the family farm, (we used to be a more agricultural country) so he would "buy the farm." Recently, however, I've heard that "farm" could mean "burial plot," so, when you die, you "buy the farm." And, what about, "biting the dust"? My guess would have been old cowboy movies. The guy gets shot in a gunfight and, falling face forward into the earth, "bites the dust." Turns out, it's a lot older than cowboy movies. The 1611 King James version mentions in Psalms 72, "lick the dust." Samuel Butler's 19th century translation of The Iliad says "...that full many of his comrades may bite the dust as they fall dying round him." Were these Butler's words or Homer's in 700 BC? I've read that the Greek is literally, "...fall headlong into the dust and bite the earth." Is "bite the dust," Butler's phrase or Homer's?

It's easier to go for the more modern death euphemisms, like "making calls from the horizontal phone booth," but in a few years, no one will know what a phone booth is. Death is the same, but what we call it changes. (Since I'm the Grim Reaper, I know all the answers, but, as we say, if I told you, I'd have to kill you.)