up on one's ear
Prepositional phrase
  1. (archaic, idiomatic) Annoyed, angry.
    • 1872, Mark Twain, Roughing It, ch. 77:
      "When you got up on your ear and called me names, and said I had brought you eleven miles to look at a sapling, didn't I explain to you that all the whale-ships in the North Seas had been wooding off of it for more than twenty-seven years?"
    • 1890, Samuel R Brown, May-day dreams, Passion flowers, Poetic flights and prosy thoughts, book 3, p. 86 (Google preview) ↗:
      [H]e has been wronged, so he gets up on his ear, and he kicks like a two-year-old bay steer.
    • 1916, Ralph Henry Barbour, Left Guard Gilbert, ch. 10:
      "He's right up on his ear," said Clint gloomily. "If he gets us now he will send us all packing, and don't you doubt it!"
    • 1916, Orison Swett Marden, Selling Things (reprinted in How to Sell without "Selling", Robert C. Worstell ed., 2014), [https://web.archive.org/web/20160305061703/https://books.google.ca/books?id=6HLCAwAAQBAJ&pg=PT80&dq=%22up+on+your+ear%22%23OR%23%22up+on+his+ear%22%23OR%23%22up+on+her+ear%22%23OR%23%22up+on+my+ear%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=8UqGVa2mBcSpyASZ74OYDg&ved=0CD0Q6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=%22up%20on%20your%20ear%22%23OR%23%22up%20on%20his%20ear%22%23OR%23%22up%20on%20her%20ear%22%23OR%23%22up%20on%20my%20ear%22&f=false ch. 23 (Google preview)]:
      I know a salesman of this sort who will never make his mark, who flares up, "gets up on his ear," as they say, when ever his sensitive, sore spots are touched.



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