English

Prepositional phrase

up on one's ear

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), 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.

Usage notes

• Often preceded by the verb get.