To give one the BAG

Insights

Desertion

A partner or patron abruptly withdraws, leaving the other stranded—financially, socially, or emotionally—‘with the bag’ to carry alone.

Cheat and swindle

Payment is taken but only an empty ‘bag’ is delivered: a figure for sharp practice where the mark discovers there is nothing inside the promise.

Sending packing

A dismissal in rough style: the person is turned off and out, bundled into mobility with nothing but a sack—a brisk way to end service or courtship.

Scapegoating

One party slips away while the other is left ‘holding the bag’—made the visible custodian of failure or debt when blame is shifted onto them.

Abandoning allegiances

To ‘give X the bag’ also means to forsake some commitment (religion, trade) for worldly advantage—only to be repaid in kind by the world.

Playground-to-proverb

Fuller links the idiom to a rough game where the stronger stuffed the weaker into a sack; from such spectacles of overpowering came the figurative boast of being able to ‘put him up in a bag,’ and its cousin, ‘give one the bag,’ meaning to rout or dismiss.

Beggar’s scrip

The ‘bag’ evokes the beggar’s sack: to ‘give him the bag’ can mean turning him a-begging—reducing status to destitution, not merely sending him away.

Empty consideration

Dekker’s ‘they’ll give him nothing but the bag’ captures a transactional swindle: the outward form (a container) sans content, a neat emblem for promises without substance.

Moral reciprocity

Adams’s antiphony—he gave Religion the bag; the world gave him the bag—casts the phrase as poetic justice: betray higher loyalties and you’ll be betrayed in turn.

Idiomatic family

The proverb sits near ‘left holding the bag,’ ‘give the slip,’ and ‘send packing’; all dramatize abandonment, but ‘the bag’ uniquely pictures the loser’s visible emptiness.

Ambidirectional grammar

English toggles objects: ‘give him the bag’ (jilt him), or ‘give Religion the bag’ (jilt Religion). The portable syntax widens the idiom’s reach from persons to principles.

Rhetorical Devices

Metonymy

The ‘bag’ stands for emptiness, beggary, or the residue of a broken deal—an object that carries the abstract idea of loss.

Antithesis (implied)

Expectation of content versus the reality of an empty sack sharpens the sense of betrayal in a single concrete contrast.

Ellipsis

Agents and causes are omitted; the bare phrase ‘give one the bag’ lets context supply whether it is jilting, cheating, or dismissal.

Irony

A container promised to hold value delivers only vacancy—form mocking content.

Alliteration echo

The blunt b-sound of ‘bag’ gives the idiom a punchy, memorable snap suited to taunt or warning.