To Walk Invisible

[jean]

I wonder if you mean it's anti-Irish racism? But taking wouldn't make much sense there - acting the mick might, but nobody says that.

I always trust Michael Quinion on such matters, and he says

...we’ve no idea whether it is a reference to an Irish Mick...

[Serial_Apologist]

Don't know anything about that - what is the nature of the offence?

An association of Mick with being Irish?

[jean]

But see my latest reply!

It's the person who's having the mick taken out of them who's being teased or made to look a fool.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I wonder if you mean it's anti-Irish racism? But taking wouldn't make much sense there - acting the mick might, but nobody says that.

From the same source as "taking somebody off"? (Which was how we described Mike Yarwood's act in the '70s - "Ooh! He's taking Max Bygraves off now!")

[jean]

But taking x off and taking the x out of someone seem quite different in meaning - in the first, the x is the person being mocked; in the second, the person being mocked is not x but the person having the x taken out of them.

[Serial_Apologist]

But see my latest reply!

It's the person who's having the mick taken out of them who's being teased or made to look a fool.

Yes, I see.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I always trust Michael Quinion on such matters, and he says

...we’ve no idea whether it is a reference to an Irish Mick...

But he also says that we don't know where the "bliss" addition came from. "The Micks" were always the Irish in my childhood, and "He's a Mick"/"Look at the Mick over there" was specifically targeted at those with Irish relatives/ancestors. "Taking the Mick out of you" was bringing the stupid aspects of your personality to the fore (although nobody would have expressed it in those terms).

My mother would always laugh a little forcefully when she heard references to "Micks" - it wasn't until I was in my twenties that I discovered why.

[jean]

But 'taking x out of' doesn't mean 'bringing x to the fore' in any context I can think of!

Besides, if the Irish were as worthy of mockery as the offensive stereotype suggests, no-one would need to make an effort to make this apparent; it would be only too obvious.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Besides, if the Irish were as worthy of mockery as the offensive stereotype suggests, no-one would need to make an effort to make this apparent; it would be only too obvious.

But it's used about non-Irish - the implication being "I'm implying that you seem as stupid as if you were Irish".

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

No - "taking ... out" = "bringing out" doesn't work, does it.

"Acting the Mickey" might - trying to remember if I ever heard this in my childhood. ("Acting the goat" frequently, usually addressed to me and following "Stop". Especially in Nativity Plays.)

[Lat-Literal]

Some original suggestions. "Take" may come from "to take the rise" or "to take a rise" which is said by experts to be, properly, "to get a rise" out of someone. "To get a rise" is to prompt some sort of reaction - annoyed, wound up or opposing factions do react by "rising up". A "rise" is also a "source" or a "spring" and "to get a rise" has been been linked to angling. I'd imagine that if one were to get a fish rising on a line only for the fish to be taken by someone else or if one were to find a good place to fish and then that was taken by someone else, well, that rise would not have been "got" but "taken". Now, "taking the mike" is 1935 - that's George Ingram's "Cockney Cavalcade" which followed Noel Coward's "Cavalcade". "Taking the piss" is 1958 - Brendan Behan's "Borstal Boy". This says to me that contrary to general opinion, "mike" came first, at least in a literary sense, and it was not "piss" turned into, and I quote from another source, a "yet to be identified character called Mickey Bliss so 'taking the piss' became 'taking the Mickey Bliss' and then just 'taking the Mickey'." No! "Piss" arrived as a substitute for many things in WW2 but rarely before. (American?) troops used "piece of piss" for "piece of cake" (The latter from Ogden Nash, 'Primrose Path' (1936) - 'Her picture's in the papers now, and life's a piece of cake"). Another example? "Pissed off", American, 1946, may be a turning around of what it means to be "ticked off", British English, as a child (1912). To my mind, it vaguely combines the misery acquired in war and the positive point about being signed off but I could be wrong.

Clearly these were years when British and American language and culture, as well as that of other cultures, mixed in various directions because of the wars. The Australians and the Irish both claim to have the derivation of "taking the piss" and in the case of the latter it is worth noting the late Behan reference. I think a number of factors are in play. The function is universal and vulgar approximations of that function in language may well go back centuries. There is always a hint of them in the 20th Century developments. Modern approaches post-war and via the internet focus on them exclusively. That is the mindset. Hence, they are probably not wonderfully accurate. For example, by the 1930s, Sir Arthur Bliss was well-known even by the general public and regarded as perhaps the key example of a musical contrarian. That idea about being wound up by music that couldn't be serious could it. He was a real person unlike the fictional Mickey Bliss. In contrast, Mickey Mouse - a joker - first arrived in 1928 with "Steamboat Willie". The main song in it, "Turkey in the Straw", American, was based on an Irish ballad "The Old Rose Tree" for which perhaps read "pee". Furthermore, where "piss" equates to "beer", and it generally does these days, I don't think one should rule out temperance as a factor in the development of this language. "To take the piss" may have been "to take the beer away". Prohibition started to be repealed in the US in 1933 so minds would have been focussed on the way beer had not been available and the extent to which it would now be made available or not.

As with much of slang during the first half of the century, the cockney figure looms, that is, one who is required to doff his cap and go to war with issues about actually to what extent does he have self-authority. Having certain family roots, this is where I go by a sense of ease or unease with words displayed by family members born since 1890, the earliest ones barely literate, with origins in genuine slums and yet surprisingly highly nuanced re swearing. It is there in the idea of others taking or getting a rise - they take and risk getting rebellion. And actually when Nash writes "and life's a piece of cake" there is more than a hint of Marie Antoinette's "let them eat cake", is there not? So I think this is an intertwining of many ideas - class difference, angling and stealing, beer perhaps as a urinary source, early Irish vernacular, cultural figures and cinema as they were known to the masses, the impact of the North Americans on the English language during the second world war and a loosening in literature towards less censorship heading into the 1960s.

A footnote:

There is a part of an episode of the Irish comedy series "Father Ted" in which the writer of steamy novels comes to stay. Mrs Doyle, the housekeeper, disapproves. She has picked up one of her books and read it. She says that she is appalled by the language and then spends several minutes saying the words or spelling them out in a highly irritated fashion to comic effect. The others in the house try to stop her by saying "yes, thank you, thank you, Mrs Doyle" and she just continues to their embarrassment. That was my non Irish but South London grandmother to a T. Hence, I know what was acceptable to a woman who spent much of her time from 1939 with market traders and who had a good amount of colourful language herself. That language was also identical to the language used by men in the family who had returned from war. The vocabulary on those streets changed from the 1960s significantly and it was led by increasingly liberal media. Some of it went very much against the grain of ordinary folk who had a differentiating class system within their own class. The "new" words would have signified to them poverty because to the extent that it was associated with their people at all it would have been associated with the poorest of the poor. The irony is that it was a meeting of that category with the intelligentsia. The lower orders had no idea how the "posh" spoke in their homes and presumably the trendier end assumed those below them were all destined for Jeremy Kyle. The objectionable part of their own reducing/equivalence was and is about their basic assumptions.

[Lat-Literal]

Dare I add to this already lengthy piece? One point I didn't make was the connection of "taking" with deflating - "to take the wind from his sails" etc. That to me is also relevant. And I would like to see the context of the phraseology in "Cockney Cavalcade" (1935) because it is just possible that the "mike" that is "taken" there is "mike" as in "microphone". The first use of "mike" in that way had been as recently as 1928. "Mic" as an abbreviation didn't come until 1961. I would think that microphones were beginning to be used more in entertainment in the 1930s for the purposes of amplification. And that Mickey Mouse cartoon also from 1928 was one of the first popular films with synchronised sound in it. So I think there is another potential link from "mike" as in "microphone" to "Mickey" as in the mouse with sound. Arguably and with such points in mind, if you "take the mike" or "take the Mickey" out of someone, you deflate them by silencing them. That again goes back to the class based issues of who has the authoratative voice. But we need to see the text.

[Serial_Apologist]

Some original suggestions. "Take" may come from "to take the rise" or "to take a rise" which is said by experts to be, properly, "to get a rise" out of someone. "To get a rise" is to prompt some sort of reaction - annoyed, wound up or opposing factions do react by "rising up". A "rise" is also a "source" or a "spring" and "to get a rise" has been been linked to angling. I'd imagine that if one were to get a fish rising on a line only for the fish to be taken by someone else or if one were to find a good place to fish and then that was taken by someone else, well, that rise would not have been "got" but "taken".

"A rise" is also slang for a male state of sexual arousal - as well as being the term for a pay increase. Confusion between these two meanings elicited a severe admonishment directed at myself for using it in a joke, back in the early 1970s:

The Queen, to Prime Minister Edward Heath: "Arise, Sir Edward".

Heath remains kneeling there, does not move.

The Queen, more insistently: "Arise, Sir Edward!"

But Heath does not move, because, you see, he doesn't know what a rise is.

That was in a period of government-demanded wage restraint, and I took it to mean that, being a Tory, Heath was too mean to know the importance to ordinary people in a time of inflation of maintaining living standards; my accusers accused me of making a sexist joke, although it had later to be explained to me that "a rise" meant the other thing - though to this day I'm not sure what would have been sexist unless it was making another person of whatever class out to be impotent the butt of a joke, or insinuative about a particular man who was rumoured at the time to be gay.

[Serial_Apologist]

Dare I add to this already lengthy piece? One point I didn't make was the connection of "taking" with deflating - "to take the wind from his sails" etc. That to me is also relevant. And I would like to see the context of the phraseology in "Cockney Cavalcade" (1935) because it is just possible that the "mike" that is "taken" there is "mike" as in "microphone". The first use of "mike" in that way had been as recently as 1928. "Mic" as an abbreviation didn't come until 1961. I would think that microphones were beginning to be used more in entertainment in the 1930s for the purposes of amplification. And that Mickey Mouse cartoon also from 1928 was one of the first popular films with synchronised sound in it. So I think there is another potential link from "mike" as in "microphone" to "Mickey" as in the mouse with sound. Arguably and with such points in mind, if you "take the mike" or "take the Mickey" out of someone, you deflate them by silencing them. That again goes back to the class based issues of who has the authoratative voice. But we need to see the text.

I'm quite sure, Lat, you need no convincing of the fact that everyday usage of the F and C words were common parlance among the upper-middle class public schoolboys among whom I had the misfortune to spend my teenage years between 1959 and 1964. My somewhat sheltered upbringing did not introduce me to either word until I was 13, when someone from "the big school" across the lane informed us of their existence, and what they meant, so that we would all be in part primed for when the inevitable time of awakening arrived.

[Lat-Literal]

"A rise" is also slang for a male state of sexual arousal - as well as being the term for a pay increase. Confusion between these two meanings elicited a severe admonishment directed at myself for using it in a joke, back in the early 1970s:

The Queen, to Prime Minister Edward Heath: "Arise, Sir Edward".

Heath remains kneeling there, does not move.

The Queen, more insistently: "Arise, Sir Edward!"

But Heath does not move, because, you see, he doesn't know what a rise is.

That was in a period of government-demanded wage restraint, and I took it to mean that, being a Tory, Heath was too mean to know the importance to ordinary people in a time of inflation of maintaining living standards; my accusers accused me of making a sexist joke, although it had later to be explained to me that "a rise" meant the other thing - though to this day I'm not sure what would have been sexist unless it was making another person of whatever class out to be impotent the butt of a joke, or insinuative about a particular man who was rumoured at the time to be gay.

I'm quite sure, Lat, you need no convincing of the fact that everyday usage of the F and C words were common parlance among the upper-middle class public schoolboys among whom I had the misfortune to spend my teenage years between 1959 and 1964. My somewhat sheltered upbringing did not introduce me to either word until I was 13, when someone from "the big school" across the lane informed us of their existence, and what they meant, so that we would all be in part primed for when the inevitable time of awakening arrived.

Yes although politically the two combine. When those at the top take a 30% pay rise and ensure the rest have no pay rise, that sort of "taking the rise" leads to an all-round sense of political impotence (unless there is a populist referendum). And yes. The main thing to remember is that excessive swearing is what links the Royal Family etc with the so-called underclass (below the so-called working class). These things were not known - the perception was that there were classes with "standards" and a lower order without "standards".

To return to the phrase "taking the Mick/Mike/Mickey/Michael" and whether it is racist, my feeling is that it makes absolutely no sense in the context of Irish politics at that time. The British who opposed Irish rebellion might have considered that "the Micks" (racist term) were "taking the Mick" as it were but in terms of juxtaposition that is not the same.

Many sources suggest that "Mick" emanates from 1856 - a shortened version of "Michael" or more likely "Mc/Mac" common to Irish surnames. However, that derivation is almost certainly American. In 1856, the actual Irish were involved in the Crimean War and there is no suggestion related to those events of stupidity or gullibility although Irishmen like Lever and Lover didn't do a great deal for perceptions of the Irish. Elsewhere we are told that it pertains to the most famous Michael Collins whose name has been acquired by many Irishmen. Well, Michael Collins was much later, closer to the time period we have been considering, not really to be taken lightly and what I have said above would seem to apply. In fact, much of the racism came from the US. The more offensive term "Paddy" is from "Paddy wagon" given to a vehicle police used to transport prisoners. The name came from the New York Draft riots of 1863. The Irish at the time were the poorest people in the city. Crucially, no one to my knowledge has ever used the phrase "taking the Paddy".