Employee Pink Slip

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Claude from Toronto, Canada.

Claude.

How are you doing, Martin Grant?

Fine, thank you.

How are you?

Very well, thank you.

The other day, I work in a government office, and we have some security to get into the building and into the offices.

And one of my colleagues had difficulties getting in, so I had to let him in.

And he was asking me, why is my car disabled?

I said, well, you know, like this is the first step.

You know, we like bantering as the first.

Your card is disabled for access, and then you have a pink slip on your desk.

So I look at him and say, do you know where that expression comes from, pink slip?

And he hadn’t had a clue.

Everybody seemed to be familiar with the expression, but nobody had a clue of where it was coming from.

So I looked a little bit on the Internet, found all sorts of various potential explanations, but nothing firm.

So I thought it was just contacting you and asking you for your good words, your good advice on that one.

So let me recap. You’re at the front door to the company.

Your co-worker’s card doesn’t work, the one they use to swipe to get into the building.

And you make a joke that that’s the first thing that they do when they’re going to fire you and give you the pink slip.

You got it.

Yeah, okay.

Oh, it was a joke.

It was a joke, yeah.

We like bantering in the office.

Yeah, sure.

Right.

It’s good spirit. But it was just a pink slip that we both look at each other. Where is that coming from?

Yeah, I used to use a joke like that when I worked in computer support when people would call me and say, I can’t get my laptop on the network. I’m like, yeah, you need to go see HR.

Oh, that’s terrible.

And funny enough, we have a very broad diversity of people working in our office.

We have people who are French, English, from Sri Lanka, Sinhalese, Tamil, German, Hebrew, Chinese, Hungarian, Arabic, Persian, you name it.

And I was looking around and asking people if there was equivalent of pink slip in their country of origin.

And it seems to be Canada pretty much.

And I think, well, in fact, United States mostly, but I think it has become an expression here also in Canada.

But nowhere else.

Yeah, so it’s the U.S. And Canada, North American English.

It has slipped a little bit across the pond to the U.K., but it’s not as common there.

You’re wondering why it’s pink, right?

Yeah.

And I’m sorry to say it’s probably really simple.

They used to print really important documents like dismissal notices on pink paper.

Okay.

That’s it.

And a lot of really…

Was doing that the military or…

Oh, throughout different kinds of…

It’s kind of like one of these standards of clerkdom, like any place that there are clerks and office workers.

You know how you used to have the three-part forms with the pink, yellow, and white, and there were triplicate and like that.

How did that form get to all these different businesses?

Just everyone adopts the same practices and standards from each other.

Sometimes it’s from the government to the government, from the military to the military, across banking or the financial services, and things spread in that way.

They just take their custom from field to field and industry to industry.

Yeah, well, you wouldn’t miss it if it were different from all the other papers on your desk.

That’s exactly right.

As a matter of fact, when I first started working on the Historical Dictionary of American Slang for Oxford University Press, we had index cards, traditional handwritten cards that recorded information that had been found in books.

And some of the cards were in white, and some of the cards were what we called salmon-colored, basically a pink.

And that was a coding for us that we knew what kind of card it was.

So even now in certain government offices, they’ll ask for the pink slip, the pink colored copy of the thing that you’ve given because it’s still really important to have that kind of visual coding.

Kind of like salmon slip.

Salmon, yeah.

So it’s really, Claude, it’s no more complicated than that.

This is like 99.99% confident that it just came from a practice of printing important documents on pink paper.

But if you’re Germany, you get, if you get the blue letter, I guess, from school, apparently this is a bad report card.

It’s bad news.

The blue letter?

Oh, yeah.

Mm—

That’s no good.

That’s not so good.

No.

And I was looking to, like in Ireland and the UK, it’s a P45 you get.

Belgium, it’s a C4.

Mm—

Right?

So there’s different expressions.

But it seems that, as you mentioned, it is North America pretty much the pink slip.

Claude, what do you do that you have so many people in the office from so many places around the world?

Well, we work in the government office, and this is typical of Toronto, of having such a very wide diversity in the workplace.

It is really not unusual at all.

Oh, that’s cool. It sounds like Martha and I could go there and just learn languages to our heart’s desires.

Yeah, and I was naming the few languages of about a dozen people.

If I extend to the entire branch, you would have, I think, every continent except perhaps Antarctica.

Oh, wow.

You’ve got to get some penguins up there.

Bring them over from the zoo.

Penguin slips.

Claude, thank you so much for your call.

Oh, thank you very much.

And I always enjoy and I learn so much listening to your program.

So thank you very much for all the hard work and responding to my question there.

It is our pleasure.

Claude, thank you.

Call again, all right?

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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