give someone the sack

Example: “The restaurant gave him the sack for showing up late three times.”

Origin: The most commonly repeated explanation points to tradesmen who once owned and carried their own tools, taking them home in a sack or bag whenever a job ended — being handed "the sack," then, meant being dismissed and sent off with your tools rather than staying on with the employer's equipment. French had donner le sac in exactly this sense from the 17th century, well before any English version, which raises a real problem for the tradesman theory: if it were genuinely that old, an English equivalent would be expected from around the same period, but the earliest clear English print citation is Charles Westmacott's The English Spy in 1825, and by then plenty of jobs a person could be "sacked" from had nothing to do with carrying a toolbag at all. John Hotten's 1869 slang dictionary records regional cousins including "get the bag" in northern England and "get the empty" in London, all sharing the same core image of being handed something to carry your belongings away in as you leave.