the.com/walk the plank

means To be forced to meet one's doom by stepping off a ship's edge into the sea — or, more commonly now, to be unceremoniously ousted from a job, team, or position.

from The image is pirate-lore gold: a blindfolded victim prodded along a board extended over the water until they drop in. The phrase shows up in English in the early 1800s, already tied to piracy, though historians have never found solid evidence it was a common real-world execution method among actual pirates or naval crews — it may have happened occasionally, but its fame owes far more to adventure fiction and later pirate mythology than to documented practice. The phrase outlived the dubious history, and today it mostly walks people out of boardrooms, not ships.