take liberties

1. Behave improperly or disrespectfully; also, make unwanted sexual advances. For example, He doesn't allow staff members to take liberties, such as calling clients by their first names , or She decided that if Jack tried to take liberties with her she would go straight home . This idiom uses liberties in the sense of “an overstepping of propriety,” and thus differs markedly from take the liberty of . [c. 1700]

2. Make a statement or take an action not warranted by the facts or circumstances, as in Their book takes liberties with the historical record .

Example Sentences

“My experience with the profession reveals police officers seem often to take liberties in reports in order to justify force or buttress an arrest,” Robinson said.

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A consistent knock on the team is that there’s no response when other teams take liberties.

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Velázquez could take liberties with his portraits of little people and jesters because they were neither members of the royal family nor nobility.

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Directly after The Slaughterhouse Cases, the court began to interpret the idea that liberty could not be taken away without due process to mean that the government couldn’t take liberties away unreasonably — and hence substantive due process was born.

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“We take liberties with Norse mythology,” says Meghan Morgan Juinio, the studio’s director of product development.

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