Please explain this sentence: His comments on TV ruffled a few people’s feathers. What “feathers”?
My comments:
It’s not supposed to be taken literally. “Feathers” refer to the feathers of birds. If you ruffle the feathers of a bird, it gets irritated and wants to get out of your reach. By analogy, if you run your hand through someone’s hair, you’ll most likely make him or her equally uncomfortable.
Now, we know birds have their feathers for a purpose – for warmth and for shield against, say, water and rain. Let’s take a duck for example. Its feathers are flatly and neatly arranged so that no water penetrates them. Instead, water falls off its back smoothly and without any hindrance whatsoever.
Yeah, “like water off the back of a duck” is also a saying. But anyways, the point is, if you ruffle the feathers of a duck in such a way that the feathers are all fluffed out and stood up and in clumps, well, it just won’t do.
By analogy with a person, man or woman, if you run your hand through their hair, well, you’ll ruin their coiffure or hairdo or simply the way their hair is combed to make them look so good and stylish. Now that you’ve ruffled their hair, why, you make their head look messy and unkempt.
Not tidy at all, in other words.
So, in short, you know people don’t want you to ruffle their hair or proverbial feathers. It makes them annoyed and irritated, angry and mad, quite uncomfortable at the very least.
In our top example, his comments on TV ruffled a few people’s feather because they don’t agree with his assessment or, say, they simply don’t want him to talk about things in public at all.
At any rate, his comments on TV seem to have gotten under their skin.
Under their skin?
Yeah, it’s a similar feeling but anyways, here are more media examples of people’s feathers, figuratively speaking, getting ruffled:
1. This Super Bowl Sunday he will be at Reliant Arena to celebrate the Tet Festival, bringing in the Vietnamese New Year while enjoying traditional music and dragon dancing.
The man who earned the nickname "Sports Mouth" on the AM dial will be with thousands of Vietnamese-Americans. He’ll pass out crisp $1 bills tucked inside red envelopes, which like black-eyed peas are said to bring good luck.
“It should be wonderful,” Warner said a few days ago. “It’s our celebration. It’s our new year.”
Our?
The outgoing Buffalo, N.Y., native doesn’t have a drop of Vietnamese blood in him, but he is all wrapped up in his current enterprise, and he sometimes gets carried away.
Warner is in his second year as president of Asian Southwest Media, a company that connects Asian media to the general market. He works frequently with Little Saigon Radio, KREH 900 AM.
For decades, the Houston public knew Warner as a brash sports talk-show host. He worked at seemingly every radio station in town and a few TV stations. His in-your-face style got him fired a few times, and for a while he couldn’t find steady work.
Some people might have been discouraged by all the job changes and the loss of the celebrity spotlight, but Warner is approaching his current livelihood with great energy and passion. He is a man who keeps bouncing back.
“You never give up,” Warner said. “The most repulsive word in the dictionary next to ‘hate’ is ‘quit.’ ”
...
Doug Harris, a marketing consultant who works with Warner, said, “Unquestionably there are some elements to his personality that will keep him from being named ‘man of the year.’ He can be abrasive and a bit long-winded and very opinionated. His manner does put some people off.”
Warner also is self-effacing. He joked about the number of times he’s been fired from radio. In Buffalo in the mid-’60s, he worked at WYSL for broadcaster/owner Gordon McLendon, who eventually let him go. Warner returned to the station -- and someone else fired him.
“After I shaved my beard, (McLendon) came up to me and said: ‘You’re a lot better than that hippie we used to have who was always ripping Notre Dame.’ ” He was referring, of course, to Warner, who would later get a third pink slip from WYSL when it changed formats.
In the early 1990s, Harris worked with Warner at KLOL. Warner was a fish out of water at the rock station and “ruffled a lot of people’s feathers,” Harris said. “But he’d bring in fresh bagels every morning and always have a hearty smile on his face.
“Even if he got on your nerves, you had to admire his perseverance.”
Along with his work in radio, Warner has been a stockbroker, wholesale floor-covering distributor, the manager of the Lamar Tower condominiums, a research and site selector for a local real estate developer, and a part-time scout for the American and National Football leagues.
- Former sportscaster turns defeat into a career, Chron.com, January 28, 2001.
2. Seimone Augustus knew it could happen. Wednesday morning before practice, Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve, her staff and the rest of the team sat down and went through the video of Friday’s blowout loss in Los Angeles, a one-sided 87-59 drubbing in which Reeve benched her starters after the Sparks built a 50-24 halftime lead.
So Reeve was a bit grumpy before practice even started. And it only got worse.
“The fact that we came out of video and didn’t have a great practice really ruffled her feathers,” Augustus said.
After two days off following Sunday’s bounce-back victory over Tulsa, the team returned to practice Wednesday. And Reeve definitely didn’t like what she saw out of her starters.
