A: How is your patient?

    B: He went to hell in a handbasket since being admitted into the ICU.

    Note: The idiom means “rapidly deteriorating and headed for complete disaster.” It isn’t at all obvious why handbasket was chosen as the preferred vehicle to convey people to hell. One theory on the origin of the phrase is that it derives from the use of handbaskets in the guillotining method of capital punishment. If Hollywood films are to be believed, the decapitated heads were caught in baskets. The first version of “in a handbasket” in print did relate to an imaginary decapitated head. In “Samuel Sewall’s Diary,” 1714, we find: A committee brought in something about Piscataqua. The governor said he would give his head in a handbasket as soon as he would pass it. The thought behind the phrase is 17th century, but the precise wording “going to hell in a handbasket” and its alternative form “going to hell in a handcart” originated in the United States around the middle of the 19th century.