up on one's ear

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.

• Often preceded by the verb get.