From The New York Times
‘You’re Fired,’ in Terms Only a Boss Could Love
By David Gillen and Will Storey
Through booms and busts, profits and losses, the vacuous jargon and happy euphemisms of the business world endure....
“The term ‘you’re fired’ probably dates back to the 19th century,” said Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Information. “It is a pun on ‘discharged’: you fired a gun, you discharged a gun. ‘I got discharged, I got fired.’ ”
Mr. Nunberg places the terms into three categories: the old vocabulary, “get fired, get sacked, get canned and so on, which are a kind of graveyard humor that people apply.” The corporate-speak: “downsize,” “right-size” and “reallocate,” which places the layoff within a larger process. And the modern, more emotional, “we’re going to have to let you go,” where it seems the employee is being released, uncaged, from his or her employment.