give someone the third degree

Example: “My parents gave me the third degree when I came home at two in the morning.”

Origin: Comes from Freemasonry, whose lodges recognize three ascending degrees of membership — Entered Apprentice, Fellowcraft, and finally Master Mason, the third and highest rank, established in its modern form by 1772. Advancing to that third degree involved a demanding initiation ceremony considerably more searching and physically rigorous than the first two, including a formal interrogation of the candidate. The phrase moved from Masonic lodges into general use for any harsh, probing questioning by the late 1800s, and by the early 1900s had become specifically and firmly associated with intense, often brutally coercive police interrogation — the ceremonial "testing" of a Masonic candidate's readiness reinterpreted as the far less voluntary grilling of a suspect.