Pop your clogs

Clogs were the everyday footwear of industrial workers in northern England, and the phrase surfaced where they were worn. The earliest known print appearance, documented by Word Histories, is in the Yorkshire paper the Shipley Times and Express of 13 May 1914, in a comic dialect piece ('Hawporths O' Yorksher') about wealth that cannot be taken with you when you 'pop your clogs'. After a 56-year gap in the printed record it reappears in Punch in 1970 (citing Miles Kington on northern English), and the OED's first citation dates from 1970; repeated use in Punch and other writers made it commonplace from the 1970s. What 'pop' means here remains unresolved: the often-repeated theory that it means 'pawn' (an old slang sense of 'pop', as in 'pop shop'), on the grounds that the dying pauper no longer needs his clogs, is a conjecture that The Phrase Finder calls strained, since a dead man's clogs would be pawned by someone else; another suggestion is that the phrase merely elaborates the older 'pop off', meaning to die, which was current by the 1760s. A Yorkshire, early-20th-century origin is the best-supported conclusion, with the derivation of 'pop' genuinely uncertain.