sacking
Meaning
The act of dismissing someone from a job.
Coarse material, such as burlap, used for making sacks.
Structure
Usage
The sacking of the manager shocked the entire team.
The potatoes were stored in a bag made of rough sacking.
His sacking was due to a serious breach of company policy.
Etymology
The word 'sacking' has a dual etymology stemming from its root 'sack'. The material sense derives from the ancient word for a bag, entering English via Latin saccus and Greek sakkos, ultimately from a Semitic source like Hebrew śaq or Phoenician, referring to a coarse cloth used for sacks. The dismissal sense is a 19th-century metaphorical development from the slang phrase "to get the sack," where a worker was literally given a sack for their possessions upon being fired. The suffix '-ing' is a productive Germanic nominalizer, turning the action of the verb into a concrete noun, thus creating a word that can refer either to the fabric itself or the act of termination.
Analysis
- sack: From Old English sacc, Latin saccus, Greek sakkos, meaning 'bag'. In the verb sense 'to dismiss', it is a metaphorical extension from the idea of a worker being given their sack (bag) to carry their belongings away. - ing: A native English suffix forming verbal nouns or gerunds, indicating an action or its result.