Reader question:

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, “l(fā)ike 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.

“I was pleased with what I saw out of our second team,” Reeve said as the team began preparation for Friday’s rematch with the Sparks. “So it must be this L.A. thing. Any time you talk about L.A., the first team runs and hides and the second team comes out and competes and plays hard. That’s what we saw today.”

Get the idea Reeve was a bit upset? The Lynx starters did struggle before being pulled in L.A. The Sparks scored 20 of their 50 first-half points off Lynx turnovers. Point guard Lindsay Whalen went without an assist and Rebekkah Brunson didn’t have a rebound, a first for both of them in a Lynx uniform.

- After bad practice, Lynx coach Reeve hints at lineup changes, StarTribune.com, June 27, 2013.

3. The image of the United States around the world has fallen substantially since Donald J. Trump became president, according to a poll of foreigners in 25 countries that was released on Monday.

The drop has been particularly steep in parts of Europe and Latin America, according to the survey of 26,112 respondents by the Pew Research Center, an independent survey and research group, that was conducted between May 20 and Aug. 12.

In only three countries — Russia, Kenya and Israel — have attitudes toward the United States improved since 2016, according to the poll.

The results largely mirrored the plunge in opinions toward the United States that was revealed in a similar Pew survey last year, the first of Mr. Trump’s presidency. However, America’s image has risen in Japan and Tunisia by 10 percentage points since 2017, and fallen by 15 percentage points in Russia, the poll shows.

Many of the foreign respondents — a median of 50 percent of the people surveyed — indicated they continued to have a favorable view of the United States. But only a median of 27 percent of those surveyed said they had confidence in Mr. Trump, compared with a median of 70 percent who reported lacking confidence in him.

Mr. Trump’s ratings were worse than those of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who had a 30 percent confidence rating, or President Xi Jinping of China, who had a 34 percent confidence rating.

“It is difficult for any administration to succeed in its foreign policy if we lose the battle of public opinion around the world,” said R. Nicholas Burns, the third-highest-ranking diplomat during the administration of George W. Bush.

Messages sent to representatives at the White House and the State Department seeking comment were not immediately responded to on Monday.

Many of the results are unsurprising. Mr. Trump has adopted explicitly nationalistic trade and foreign policies, and he has often complained that the rest of the world has been taking advantage of the United States or has relied for too long on an American security umbrella with little or no compensation.

His complaints about illegal and even legal immigration from Mexico have led him to be far less popular there than former President Barack Obama. Thirty-two percent of Mexicans polled had a positive view of the United States in the 2018 survey, compared with 66 percent in 2016, when Mr. Obama was president.

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best — they’re not sending you,” Mr. Trump said in 2015 when he began his campaign for the presidency at Trump Tower. “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

Similar plunges occurred in the Netherlands, Germany and Canada.

When Mr. Trump imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from Canada, Mexico and the European Union, the action inevitably ruffled their feathers. He called Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada “very dishonest and weak” in a Twitter post that outraged Canadians across the political spectrum.

- Foreigners’ Views of America Dim Under Trump, Poll Shows, The New York Times, October 01, 2018.

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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：張欣 編輯：丹妮）