taps aff
- noun
- UK
:
desnudarse
- It's so hot outside that everyone is taking their taps aff.
Examples
-
Locals joked that it was officially taps aff as soon as the temperature reached 15°C.
-
When the sun comes out in Glasgow, it's always taps aff weather.
-
The festival was postponed when the taps aff warning was posted due to maintenance.
-
After winning the match, the crowd started to taps aff in celebration.
-
When the sun comes out in Glasgow, it's always taps aff weather.
-
Locals joked that it was officially taps aff as soon as the temperature reached 15°C.
-
After winning the match, the crowd started to taps aff in celebration.
Synonyms
An announcement that a bar or pub stops serving alcohol
Surface Forms
Morphology
taps + aff
This is a regional Scots expression whose constituents ('taps' and 'aff') are nonstandard or not listed in learners' dictionaries, so a B1 learner who only knows the (standard) constituent words would not be able to derive 'take off one's shirt' from them. Even if 'aff' is recognized as a dialectal variant of 'off', 'taps' is not transparently linked to 'tops' or 'shirts', making the phrase idiomatic/dialectal and therefore opaque.
Etymology
Taps aff may come from a Scottish way of saying 'tops off': taps (like 'tops', meaning shirts) and aff (meaning 'off'), so picture people taking their shirts off in warm weather — that explains the 'taking off one's shirt' meaning. The same words also make sense for a notice about water, because if the water taps are aff it means the 'water is shut off', so the phrase can be used for that warning too.
