raise someone's hackles
verb1
Idiomatic To annoy or anger someone.
- Every time I hear him talk, he just raises my hackles.
- Much as I admire Wilson’s tour de force—I wish people would read it more and read about it less—my hackles have always risen at the entirely false suggestion that his book influenced mine.1976, Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Kindle edition, OUP Oxford, published 2016, page 429:
2 more examples
- Google announced its breakthrough in a paper published in the science journal Nature. And its claims have raised the hackles of researchers at competing companies who believe the Silicon Valley giant is inflating its accomplishment.2019 October 23, David Yaffe-Bellany, “Quantum Computing Explained (in Mere Minutes!)”, in New York Times:
- View the film now and it’s not hard to see what raised the hackles of such groups.2022 March 20, Jason Bailey, “‘Basic Instinct’ at 30: A Time Capsule That Can Still Offend”, in The New York Times, →ISSN:
- Related terms
- make someone's hair stand on end, rub someone the wrong way