The English language never fails to amaze me. Today, my attention was caught by a rather peculiar fact: there are a dozen ways to say that someone has been forced to leave their job. Some of them are more polite than others, some are rather brutal but honest, some are iconic but a little misleading. But let's review them one by one.
In the pH7 section - the sort of neutral, straightforward area - we have 'dismiss' and 'lay off', that alongside the expression 'make someone redundant', which adds the fatalistic colouring of "we loved you, but we had to show you to the door due to business restructuring", are meant not to make the former employees feel bad about themselves.
'Bounce' has a kind of 'gangsta' flavour to it - perhaps because it remind me of the word 'bouncer' - or a childish slant that gives the idea of a rejection: I imagine the poor fellow like a frustrated little boy who has just been denied his lollipop fix at a fun fair.
Some expressions are just effective: they are short, snappy and blunt. 'Fire' reminds me of someone being shot; 'sack', plus the variant 'give someone the sack', which is probably the harshest one, reminds me of someone given a bundle to put his belongings and bound to a miserable roaming of a life; 'give someone the boot' or 'boot out', which I have just discovered, is brilliant for the imagery it evokes, although it hints at some bitterness underlying the gesture.
The bureaucratic language puts it in a very formal way: 'give someone x days, weeks' notice', when at least the employer is polite enough - or legally bound - to give you some time to figure out what you will to do to pay the bills in the future.
The sneaky ones are those which make use of otherwise harmless words: surprisingly the verb 'can' in colloquial American English has the dreadful meaning of 'terminating'. 'Discharge' is also among the tricky words: it reminds me both of a discharged battery, metaphor for a worn-out employee, and of a dump full of jobless desperadoes.
Some expressions take a rather ironic angle: 'let go', as if the employee needed more freedom, 'send away' as if the employee was a letter and 'axe' as if the employee was Louis XVI ready to have his head cut off by the neat blade of a guillotine (hence, the Italian sadistic moniker 'tagliatore di teste', which means 'head-cutter', for those who make a living out of sacking people).
But my most favourite one is definitely 'kiss off', to which most people would answer back with a sound 'f*** off!'. 'Give someone the kiss-off' is a little bit like giving someone 'Judas kiss': a vile move right before the blow.
Such a colourful array of choices contrast sharply with the scant range of words available to say the contrary: 'hire', 'employ', 'take on'... quite dull, ain't it? Maybe people need to suggest and allude more when it comes to giving a bad -though not always- news. As it often is, negativity comes with creativity. And in this respect, the English are particularly creative.
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