From birth to death, the word kick has been given an important part in expressing human experience. The proud and happy mother feels the first signs of life kicking inside her body. And that same life------many years later------ comes to its end in a widely-used expression, to kick the bucket( ) .  The expression to kick the bucket is almost 200 years old.  One belief is that it started when an English stableman  killed himself by hanging  while standing on a bucket. He put a rope around his neck and tied it to a beam  in the ceiling, and then kicked the bucket away from under him. Another old expression that comes from England is to kick over the traces. Traces were the chains  that held at horse or mule to a wagon or plow. Sometimes, an animal refused to obey and kicked over the traces. Kick around is an expression that is heard often in American English. A person who is kicked around is someone who is treated badly. Usually he is not really being kicked by somebody's foot. He is just not being treated with the respect that all of us want. A person who has kicked around for most of his life is someone who has spent his life moving from place to place. In this case, kicking around means moving often from one place to another. Kick around has another meaning when you use it with the word idea. When you kick around an idea, you are giving that idea some thought. There is no physical action when you kick a person upstairs, although the pain can be as strong .You kick a person upstairs by removing him from an important job and giving him a job that sounds more important, but really is not. Still another meaning of the word kick is to free oneself of a bad habit, such as smoking cigarettes. Health campaigns urge smokers to kick the habit. Though Tom got raised to a better position by his boss, he had no power, we can say   _
the boss kicked Tom upstairs Tom kicked the bucket Tom kicked the bad habit Tom kicked around an idea