The Evolution of the Pink Slip

NEW YORK (MainStreet) -- While a pink slip of paper sitting ominously in a mailbox means "you're fired" in the movies, nobody seems to have had this experience in real life.

"It's not that [pink slips] are an urban legend," says Jesse Sheidlower, North America's editor at large for the Oxford English Dictionary. "It's just that no one has found an actual pink slip at around the time when the expression first started to be used."

Termination procedures have evolved significantly during the past 50 years.

Sheidlower explains that the furthest back the colloquialism can be traced is to 1904, when a typographer's journal wrote that making a mistake earned a person a pink slip and that accumulating enough of these would get a person fired.

Funnily enough, the phrase has many parallels to the firing practice of other cultures, Sheidlower confirmed, pointing to a Snopes article. Germans get blue papers, while French military personnel are said to get a yellow one.

Other than that, no hard evidence exists to prove people were actually issued a pink slip as notice they no longer had a job, though Bruce Hurwitz, president of Hurwitz Strategic Staffing in New York, speculates that the pink slip could also be traced back to a company's general propensity to use tri-colored forms for documenting an employee's transgression.

"The yellow copy goes to human resources, the blue copy is for the employer and the pink one goes to the employee," he says.

Origin mysteries aside, terminations have evolved significantly during the past 50 years.

"Fifty years ago, it was sort of a free for all," says Bruce Clarke, president and chief executive of CAI, a human resource management firm in North Carolina. He explains that companies would fire employees willy-nilly with little regard for protocol.

"The pendulum has swung so far in the other direction," he says, explaining that companies have to jump through plenty of hoops to let someone go.