Meaning
To die - with the assumption built in that someone is waiting on the other side. The euphemism treats death as an appointment with the manufacturer, which lets speakers mention the fact while dodging the word. Euphemistic, with room for either solemnity or comedy; capitalize Maker when the theology is meant, lowercase when the python has expired. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The phrase rests on the old belief that the dead travel to a supernatural place where they may meet their creator, and English had been sending people to their Maker since the ballads of the nineteenth century: the execution broadside on Frederick Baker, collected in Curiosities of Street Literature, has the hanged man on the gallows high, where he has met his Maker - 1871 in print. Edgar Rice Burroughs sent a dying sailor to meet his Maker in 1918, and Monty Python sealed the phrase's comic afterlife in 1969 when Mr Praline complains of the parrot that it has expired and gone to meet its maker - the euphemism itself deadpanned to death. The idiom dictionaries date it around 1900 to the mid-twentieth century in standard use, and it remains the undertaker's and the journalist's favourite: final, brief, and technically hopeful.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- gone to meet his maker
- meet one's maker
Usage Examples
- The old foreman went to meet his maker with a torque wrench in one hand, according to the eulogy.
- 'He's gone to meet his maker,' the vet said gently, and the parrot's owner thought of the refund.
- Writers on deadlines joke constantly about meeting their maker, usually by chapter eleven.