Placeholder Image

Subtitles section Play video

  • Hi this is Tutor Nick P and this is Idioms 289. The . today is to dock

  • someone's pay. Okay. Let's take a look at the note here. If a company or boss docks

  • a workers pay, he removes a part or percentage of his or her pay usually as

  • a punishment because they did something wrong. Okay. And they believed it deserved

  • actually maybe cutting part of the pay. All right. Let's continue. The origin of

  • this phrase comes from an Old English definition you know, of dock of course,

  • that meant to cut something short. This use also relates to when some people

  • actually cut a dog's tail short for style. Yeah. I have seen this done. I

  • always kind of felt sorry for some poor dogs and I always wonder why people

  • did that. But perhaps I guess they just liked that style on the ... on the

  • animal. Okay. Good. It is also used among horse breeders. I guess some horse breeders

  • do this to horses' tails as well. This use dates back to the 14th century. Even

  • today the part of an animal's tail that is left after it has been shortened is

  • called a dock. Okay. All right. We just have a couple of

  • examples you know, to show this use here. So example number one. If you are more

  • than 10 minutes late the company will dock your pay for an hour. Yeah. So you

  • know , maybe this is to make sure everybody gets to work on time. So if you

  • end up just over 10 minutes late well they'll cut a whole hours pay from you

  • to try to you know make sure you don't do that. Okay. And number two here. The boss

  • is docking Jack's pay to reimburse the company for all the fragile items he

  • knocked over and broke. Yeah. So maybe he had an accident and he broke some

  • expensive stuff at the company and you know, he's docking his pay.

  • until he pays back for all the damage that he did for the accident that he

  • caused at work. Okay. , I hope you got it. I hope it was clear. Thank you for your

  • time. Bye-bye.

Hi this is Tutor Nick P and this is Idioms 289. The . today is to dock

Subtitles and vocabulary

Click the word to look it up Click the word to find further inforamtion about it