pink slip
11
4.0
- noun
- /pɪŋk slɪp/
- US
:
carta de despido
- The company announced its layoffs, and many employees nervously awaited their pink slips during the meeting.
- get pink slips
- handed pink slips
- give pink slips
Examples
-
Dozens of pink slips have been issued and several tenured faculty have been retrenched.
Academic text (1991) -
The next morning, he gave pink slips to all his employees.
Blog text (18) -
In the real world, such performance is rewarded with a pink slip.
Blog text (1) -
Last week, a round of pink slips went out.
-
You can be fired, laid off, let go, given a pink slip, or terminated.
Blog text (17) -
Notre Dame gave him the pink slip for a reason.
Blog text (29) -
Entire sectors are laying people off faster than they can print the pink slips.
Blog text (4) -
The day I got my pink slip (who needed a woman on a full all-male crew?) the foreman's nephew approached.
Fiction book (1996) -
We further learned that he had initialed the termination order a month ago and that the pink slip had been drawn up, duly dated as of Quaid's third anniversary two days ago, with severance pay waiting.
Fiction book (2000) -
After a tough performance review, she was handed her pink slip and left the office feeling defeated.
Synonyms
49
3.3
To remove someone from their job against their will
6
7.5
An official notice telling someone they have been fired from a job
Antonyms
Surface Forms
Morphology
Although 'pink' + 'slip' transparently describes a small pink piece of paper, the specific sense 'notice of dismissal' is an idiomatic, culture-specific workplace term that cannot be derived from the literal meanings. This historical/US-specific usage is not predictable from the constituents and would not be obvious to a B1 learner who had not previously encountered the idiom.
Etymology
Pink slip may come from a real, small piece of paper: employers used to give a pink slip to a worker when they were let go. So, seeing a pink slip came to mean 'you are fired' or 'you have lost your job'.