Reader question:
Please explain “his back is up” in this quote: “I can understand why his back is up to be on the receiving end of the sort of abuse that was directed his way.”
My comments:
Having to endure all sorts of nasty criticism, he is now, understandably, a very angry man.
He’s angry and defensive. He’s ready to fight back.
That’s why “his back is up”. And this is an idiom very probably inspired by animal behavior. When two cats get ready to fight each other, for example, they arch their back to make themselves look taller and more intimidating. Not just small cats, of course, big cats in the wild, such as tigers, lions and leopards do the exact same thing. They arch their back before making a devastating lunge at their opponent or victim.
So, getting one’s back up becomes synonymous with assuming an aggressive posture.
Human, don’t forget, do the same thing or, at any rate, similar thing. Whenever we see or hear something that makes us angry, our back, involuntarily, stiffen, as our muscles tense up. Instantly we become combative. We are ready to fight back.
In our example, the speaker says they can understand why “his back is up” because they have seen all the abuse he has to endure.
Now, he’s angry. He’s defensive. He’s ready to fight back, one way or another.
All right, let’s read a few examples of “getting someone’s back up”, which is the more frequently used expression, meaning to anger someone and provoke them into a defensive or fighting mode:
1. It was as if the stars aligned to make James Cameron’s “Titanic” one of the greatest successes in movie history: Leonardo DiCaprio ... Kate Winslet ... a doomed ship ... one of the most compelling tragedies of the last century.
Yes, the stars aligned. Except for the real ones – the ones the film showed in the sky over Winslet as she clung, frozen, to debris after the great ship sank on April 15, 1912.
The film first came out in 1997. Now, as Cameron releases a new version of the film in 3-D, he reveals that he’s moved heaven and Earth – or at least the heavens – so that they’ll now be accurate.
For this change, he grudgingly (or laughingly) thanks Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist and popularizer of science who directs the Rose Center for Earth and Space at New York’s American Museum of Natural History.
“When I saw the movie I said, ‘This guy is all wrong,’” said Tyson, laughing, when we spoke with him. “I’m not usually a stickler for detail – I think it’s better to give artists free range – except that part of the sales pitch for the movie was that Cameron had gone to such lengths to make the film accurate.
“He’d gone diving to the wreck, he’d gotten the china right, the linen right, the costumes right, the wall sconces right. Can we go back and check those things? No, but we can check where the stars would have been.”
Cameron’s epic just showed random dots in the sky, added as an effect after Winslet’s near-death was filmed. Tyson wrote him a letter. No answer.
Years passed, and the two men wound up at dinner together. Tyson, perhaps with the help of a glass of good wine, made his case again.
“I said, ‘Jim’ – before, it would have been ‘Mr. Cameron’ – Jim, my issue here is not that the sky was wrong, it was that you got everything else right,’” he said.
Apparently Cameron got his back up a bit. “The last I checked, ‘Titanic’ worldwide has grossed $1.3 billion. Imagine how much more it would have grossed if I had gotten the sky correct,” Tyson quotes him as saying.
And on it went. But finally, with Cameron updating the film, he challenged Tyson to send him data for the right stars.
Cameron has put out a widely-quoted explanation: “Neil deGrasse Tyson sent me quite a snarky email saying that, at that time of year, in that position in the Atlantic in 1912, when Rose is lying on the piece of driftwood and staring up at the stars, that is not the star field she would have seen.
“And with my reputation as a perfectionist, I should have known that and I should have put the right star field in.”
Tyson chuckles.
“He surely thought of me as some Chihuahua nipping at his ankles,” he says now. But as for the “snarky” reference, Tyson says, “I take that as a sign of affection directed at me by a perfectionist.”
- ‘Titanic’: James Cameron Moves the Stars for Film’s 3-D Release, ABC News, April 4, 2012.
2. It started as a headline seemingly straight out of The Onion. Then it unleashed a torrent of jokes on late-night television and social media. And finally it exploded into a serious diplomatic rupture between the United States and one of its longtime allies.
In the latest only-in-Trumpland episode skating precariously along the line between farce and tragedy, the president of the United States on Wednesday attacked the prime minister of Denmark because she will not sell him Greenland – and found the very notion “absurd.”
Never mind that much of the rest of the world thought it sounded absurd as well. Amid a global laughing fit, Mr. Trump got his back up and lashed out, as he is wont to do, and called the prime minister “nasty,” one of his favorite insults, particularly employed against women who offend him, like Hillary Clinton and Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex.
All of which might be written off as just another odd moment in a presidency unlike any other. Except that attacking Denmark was not enough for the president. He decided to expand his target list to include NATO because, as he pointed out, Denmark is a member of the Atlantic alliance. And he chose to do this just two days before leaving Washington to travel to an international summit in France, which also happens to be a NATO member.
Mockery, of course, is not the reaction most presidents seek to inspire in foreign counterparts heading into important meetings. Most of the other leaders of the Group of 7 powers will no doubt save their eye-rolling for when he is not looking, but they have come to see mercurial behavior as the new norm by the president.
“This is yet another blow to American credibility under President Trump,” said Ivo H. Daalder, a former ambassador to NATO under President Barack Obama. “No leader, friend or foe, will take America seriously.”
“It’s not just the unthinkable notion of buying and selling territory as if we’re talking about a building or golf course,” he added. “It’s also the abrupt cancellation of a state visit as a result of the totally predictable rejection of that notion.”
- Trump’s Interest in Buying Greenland Seemed Like a Joke, NYTimes.com, August 21, 2019.
3. There are times when Brendan Rodgers just wants to get something off his chest.
This was one of them. It was clear the Celtic manager was pleased to get an immediate response from his team after the shock stinker thrown in at Ibrox a few days previous. But it was also obvious there was something else eating at the boss aside from that uncharacteristic display in the defeat to the old foes.
His players might have got a bit of flak from their gaffer in the Ibrox dressing room. It was the supporters who were in for a strongly worded telling off though. Rodgers was seething at the singing about former hero Kieran Tierney towards the end of the 3-0 stroll against St Mirren. But it was some of the groans when it was still 0-0 after half an hour that really got his back up.
Rodgers said: “I have a big respect for this group of players, especially on a day like today, because when it was 0-0 for the first 20 minutes, and when we’d make a backward pass the crowd would be onto the team. That cannot happen. One, if you know about football, and two, if you can understand it when teams come here, they’re going to make it really difficult.
“You can’t turn up every single week with three, four an hour in 20 minutes. Teams are well organised, teams are well set up, you have to work the game.
“So sometimes you have to play a backward pass to change the point of attack. We make a backward pass, and then we go to the players, and that’s why I was proud of the players. I don’t need the cheers when it’s 3-0, and the support when it’s 3 or 4-0, or 5-0. This team needs it.
“It’s just the amount of games that they’re playing, and how we play. You only need to look at the facts and how this team plays to know they’re an attacking team, a creative team that creates goals and scores goals. So when we decide to go back to change the point of attack, clap the players, don’t panic. Don’t start getting on to them. Because we’re trying to get another level.”
- Brendan Rodgers tells Celtic fans what REALLY got his back up as Tierney chant wasn’t only crime in boss’ eyes, DailyRecord.co.uk, January 5, 2025.
本文仅代表作者本人观点，与本网立场无关。欢迎大家讨论学术问题，尊重他人，禁止人身攻击和发布一切违反国家现行法律法规的内容。
About the author:
Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.
（作者：张欣）
