Taking the piss

Taking the piss is a British term meaning to take liberties at the expense of others, or to be unreasonable. It is often used (or confused) with taking the piss out of which is an expression meaning to mock, tease, ridicule, or scoff. It is also not to be confused with "taking a piss", which refers to the actual biological act of urinating. Taking the Mickey (Mickey Bliss, Cockney rhyming slang) or taking the Michael is another term for making fun of someone. These terms are most widely used in the United Kingdom, Ireland, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia.

Usage

The term sometimes refers to a form of mockery in which the mocker exaggerates the other person's characteristics; pretending to take on his or her attitudes, etc., in order to make them look funny. Or it may be used to refer to a ruse where a person is led to believe something is true that is not (usually a fairly unbelievable story) for the purpose of ridicule of the subject.

The phrase is in common usage throughout British society, employed by headline writers in broadsheet gazettes and tabloids as well as colloquially. It is also used in English speaking countries such as Australia.

In colloquial usage, "taking the piss" is also used to refer to someone or something that makes a claim which is not in line with a recognised agreement e.g. an invoice that is double the quoted price with no explanation for the added charge could be said to "take the piss", or likewise if something consistently misses a deadline.

The term can also mean to take unfair advantage. For example, if someone has a food buffet and one guest clearly takes more than their expected share. It can also relate to an abuse of trust, such as "You can use my 'phone, but don't take the piss!"

Origin

"Take the piss" may be a reference to a related (and dated) idiomatic expression, piss-proud. This is a vulgar pun referring to the morning erections men frequently experience, which have long been popularly attributed to arising from a full bladder, and thus could be considered a "false" erection. In a metaphoric sense, then, someone who is "piss-proud" would suffer from false pride, and taking the piss out of them refers to deflating this false pride, through disparagement or mockery. As knowledge of the expression's metaphoric origin became lost on users, "taking the piss out of" came to be synonymous with disparagement or mockery itself, with less regard to the pride of the subject.

"Take the mickey" may be an abbreviated form of the Cockney rhyming slang "take the mickey bliss", a euphemism for "take the piss." It has also been suggested that "Mickey" is a contraction of "micturate" (urine), in which case "take the micturate" would be a synonymous euphemism for "take the piss." The phrase has been noted since the 1930s.

Alternative theories of origin

One theory is that during the age of the canals in Britain, urine would be brought up the canals to the wool mills in Northern England (particularly to Yorkshire), as urine was used in the process of fixing dye to wool. This was particularly the case for the dyeing items blue with indigo or more traditionally with woad, before synthetic dyes were invented or made commercially available. Being in the business of transporting urine was much less lucrative than transporting wine, so when the boatmen were questioned what they were carrying they would lie and say "I'm taking wine" and the response would be "No you're taking the piss" to express disbelief.

Another theory is that, when tanners had huge pots outside where they worked, the public would be encouraged to urinate into these pots as tanners used the urine to help with tanning and then the saying of "taking the piss" came into use. Alternately, the phrase may have nothing to do with urine, but could comes from the medieval Latin word pisittacus, parrot (or, in medieval French and Anglo-Norman, pistake); just as the parrot teases with speech, so does someone who is taking the piss.

The expression could come from a military background. During the Spanish civil war the phrase "pass the piss" was used, referring to the use of urine to cool Vickers machine guns when the operators ran out of water. Jerry cans were filled with urine and used to cool the machine guns. The expression "taking the piss" could originate from this as Vickers machine guns were widely used by British forces and it would certainly be inconvenient if someone was "taking the piss". Furthermore all the countries cited who use the term had military forces which used this weapon at some point.