Taking the piss (was: teenager doing accents)

[Lynne Murphy]

One  thing about 'taking the piss' is that it's almost always used in
reaction to it happening--i.e. 'Are you taking the piss?'  'Stop taking the
piss!'  or 'Don't mind him, he's just taking the piss out of you'  Since
taking the piss involves sarcasm (I can't think of a verbal example when it
doesn't, and the inanimate examples are cases of irony), there's always the
chance that it will go unnoticed or that there's unsureness about whether
the piss is being taken or the person's being sincere.  But I wouldn't say
that intention to deceive is part of it.  If Americans say that it is, then
we're just adding to the British preconception that we don't 'get' irony!
:)

Incidentally, OED doesn't record any sense of deception with it:

b. colloq. (chiefly Brit., Austral., and N.Z.). to take the piss (out of):
to make fun (of), to mock, deride, satirize; = to take the mickey (out of)
at MICKEY n.1 7.

Lynne


--On den 5 oktober 2010 14:22 -0400 Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 6:23 AM, Paul Frank <paulfrank at post.harvard.edu>
> wrote:
>
>> My impression was that a successful pisstake
>> was done to someone's face but with sufficient subtlety that the
>> victim didn't know he was having the piss taken.
>
> That sounds like what is/was? called "joning" (I don't have even the
> wildest guess as to the origin of the connection between sound and
> meaning, in this case) in Saint Louis BE.
>
> Peggy sees Darlene engaging the full attention of a group of four guys
> who, consequently, have failed to acknowledge Peggy's arrival.
>
> P. Darlene, why don't you shut up?! Your *mouth* is too big!
>
> D. Well, at least, my mouth isn't as big as that *hole* that *you're*
> standing over!
>
> Thrown into confusion by this retort, Peggy, incredibly and foolishly,
>  actually looks down and around for the "hole" to which Darlene has
> referred, not in the least aware that Darlene has just _joned_ with
> her in a manner relevant only WRT female anatomy, yet has done so so
> subtly that Peggy has no idea what Darlene is talking about, yet so
> clearly that the reference is totally obvious to bystanders, who, of
> course, are laughing their asses off.
>
> Had Peggy immediately grasped Darlene's meaning, she *still* would
> have been "fronted off" - publicly humiliated.
>
> Joning doesn't get much better that that!
> --
> -Wilson
> –––
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"––a strange complaint to
> come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> –Mark Twain



Dr M Lynne Murphy
Senior Lecturer in Linguistics
Director of English Language and Linguistics
School of English
Arts B348
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QN

phone: +44-(0)1273-678844
http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org