under the table

Example: “The builder offered a discount if we paid under the table.”

Origin: Carries two genuinely separate idiomatic histories that happen to share identical wording. The older sense — becoming so drunk you slide out of your chair and end up beneath the table, or more figuratively, drinking a companion into that same state before you do — is documented in England from the early 1600s, with the specifically literal "passed out drunk" sense recorded by 1913. A separate, later sense describing secret, dishonest payments — a bribe, a hidden cut, an illicit deal — draws on the plain physical concealment of literally passing money beneath a table's surface, out of any onlooker's sight; this sense is linked to bribery by the 1700s and gambling by the 1800s, and gained particular new life during Prohibition, when the closely related "under the counter" described illegal alcohol changing hands out of public view.