call (one) on the carpet

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call (one) on the carpet

To scold, rebuke, or reprimand one. When my team lost that big client, the boss called me on the carpet.

call someone on the carpet

and haul someone on the carpet

Fig. to reprimand a person. (When done by someone of clear superiority. Haul is stronger than call.) One more error like that and the big boss will call you on the carpet. I'm sorry it went wrong. I really hope the regional manager doesn't call me on the carpet again.

call on the carpet

Summon for a scolding or rebuke, as in Suspecting a leak to the press, the governor called his press secretary on the carpet. This term began as on the carpet, which in the early 1700s referred to a cloth (carpet) covering a conference table and therefore came to mean "under consideration or discussion." In 19th-century America, however, carpet meant "floor covering," and the expression, first recorded in 1902, alluded to being called before or reprimanded by a person rich or powerful enough to have a carpet.

on the carpet, to be/call/put

To be reproved or interrogated by one’s superior. In the eighteenth century a carpet was also a table cover, and to put something on the carpet meant for it to be on the table—that is, under discussion. However, to walk on the carpet meant, in the early nineteenth century, to be reprimanded, as generally only employers or gentry used carpeted floors, and a servant who did so was being summoned for a reproof. By the late nineteenth century carpets were exclusively floor coverings, but still confined to the rooms of the rich, highborn, or employers. Presumably they sometimes summoned underlings for other purposes than reprimand, but only that meaning survived, as in G. H. Lorimer’s 1902 letter: “The boss of the canning-room [will be] called on the carpet” (Letters of a Self-Made Merchant to His Son).