Worked up like that?

Reader question:

Please explain “worked up” in this: He was furious. I’ve never seen him worked up like that, shouting at me in front of people. I was, like, two minutes late. Two minutes, okay?

My comments:

He, whoever that is, has completely lost his cool.

Worked up?

Have you done any work out or physical exercise, keeping at it till you work up a sweat?

That’s how to understand the phrase “work up”. It means you’re warming up, whipping up the circulation pretty well, and, later, beginning to sweat.
That’s you being worked up, physically.

Emotionally, one can be worked up as well, and in similar fashion.

By that, I mean, it’s a gradual process. In our example, “he” is obviously obsessed about punctuality and the speaker is late – again. I mean, it’s perhaps not the first time that the speaker is late. Every time the speaker is late, “he” is upset. After a few times, he finally loses it – losing his cool.

His fury has been welling up and swelling. Then, finally, he erupted – like a volcano.

I’m exaggerating a bit. But you get the idea.

So, when a person is emotionally worked up, it means they’re in a heightened state of agitation, frustration or pure excitement.

Pure excitement, I mean, in a good way. For example, one can be worked up anticipating seeing their favorite singer live in concert the next day or, in fact, looking forward to soccer’s World Cup later this month.

All right, let’s read a few media examples of “worked up”:

1. If Brian De Palma were as good at rewriting as he is at visual style, “Snake Eyes” might have been a heck of a movie. He isn’t, and it isn’t. It’s the worst kind of bad film: the kind that gets you all worked up and then lets you down, instead of just being lousy from the first shot.

Now about that first shot. It’s wonderful. It’s a Steadicam take that runs on and on, seemingly forever. Nicolas Cage is onscreen for almost every second of it, as a corrupt Atlantic City, N.J., cop who scuttles backstage and ringside at a heavyweight championship fight. He shakes down a creep, he places a bet, he has a chat with his old friend who is in charge of security, he talks on the phone with his wife and kid, he schmoozes with a sexy blond who sits down next to him, and he’s sitting right in front of the U.S. Secretary of Defense when the man is assassinated.

I’d have to look at the film very carefully to be sure how long this uninterrupted single shot is; it’s possible that De Palma has hidden a couple of cuts in the middle of swish-pans. No matter; he steals the crown here from the famous long takes by Martin Scorsese in “Good Fellas” and Paul Thomas Anderson in “Boogie Nights,” and its virtuoso work, as the camera follows Cage up and down stairs and he never quits talking.

Cage is wonderful, all the extras and supporting actors hit their marks right on time, the camera work (by Stephen H. Burum) is perfectly coordinated, the energy level is high, there’s great excitement and I’m scribbling “terrific opening!” in my notes.

Alas, slowly at first and then with stunning rapidity, the movie falls apart. It has the elements for a good thriller, and De Palma still has some surprises up his sleeve, but it’s a downhill slog.

- Reviews: Snake Eyes, By Roger Ebert, RogerEbert.come, August 7, 1998.

2. The ghostwriter for Prince Harry's tell-all memoir, Spare, is clearing the record.

In a new essay published by the New Yorker, J. R. Moehringer – also the author of The Tender Bar – opened up about writing the book with the Duke of Sussex for two years. The essay illuminates his close relationship with the royal, from the fight that almost ended their professional relationship to what it was like to temporarily live with Harry and Duchess Meghan in their California home.

Moehringer recalls a late night Zoom session with Harry to go over the book’s edits. The two reached an impasse over a specific section in the book, in which Harry is in the midst of a brutal military training that simulates the experience of being kidnapped and tortured by terrorists. He is beaten, starved, stripped, and – at one point – the pretend captors hurl insults at him, one of which is a “vile dig” at his late mother, Princess Diana.

Harry insisted that this part of the book end with a witty comeback he hurled back at the captor, but Moehringer disagreed. He said:

“Although this wasn’t the first time that Harry and I had argued, it felt different; it felt as if we were hurtling toward some kind of decisive rupture, in part because Harry was no longer saying anything. He was just glaring into the camera. Finally, he exhaled and calmly explained that, all his life, people had belittled his intellectual capabilities, and this flash of cleverness proved that, even after being kicked and punched and deprived of sleep and food, he had his wits about him.”

In the end, Moehringer convinced the royal to exclude the witticism from the passage, arguing that it unnecessarily detracts from the story’s narrative power. Harry relented, then cheekily joked to the writer afterwards, “I really enjoy getting you worked up like that.”

- Prince Harry’s Spare Ghostwriter Speaks Out About Working On The Explosive Memoir, Elle.com, May 9, 2023.

3. For days before the Wall Street Journal published its story about Donald Trump’s salacious friendship with Jeffrey Epstein on Thursday, the president was frantically working the phones.

He reportedly put pressure on the paper’s top editor, Emma Tucker, and even Rupert Murdoch, who controls the paper’s business side, claiming that the alleged facts behind the story were nothing but a hoax, and threatening to sue the paper if it forged ahead. (Following publication of this article, Trump filed a suit against the paper and Murdoch.)

How worked up was he? “On a fucking warpath,” one administration official told Rolling Stone magazine.

Now that the story has been published – appearing on the Journal’s print-edition front page, no less – and picked up everywhere, it’s easy to see what Trump was so upset about. And equally easy to see why trying to snuff it out in advance became such a high priority.

It’s not just that the 50th birthday card he reportedly penned for the future convicted child-sex offender is so damning in itself, with its bawdy sketch and references to shared secrets and “enigmas” that “never age”.

It’s not just that Trump has been denying a tight friendship with Epstein – who died in jail in 2019 – for some time, and that this would clearly put the lie to that.

It’s not just that he really, really wants this scandal to go away since it has been turning swaths of his normally cult-like base against him.

No, there’s another element – and a brutal one for the president. It’s where the story was published: in the Wall Street Journal, whose conservative opinion side has often backed him and whose news side has a reputation for ensuring that explosive stories are bulletproof: accurate in their facts and fully prepared to stand up under legal scrutiny.

What’s more, the newspaper is controlled by Rupert Murdoch, Trump’s most important media ally.

Murdoch’s rightwing outfit, Fox News, has been Trump’s cheerleader and alter ego for years and played a crucial role in getting him elected twice. (Fox News has been much more docile in recent days, doing Trump’s bidding by almost shutting down its reporting and commentary on Epstein and Trump.) And Murdoch’s right-leaning tabloid the New York Post tends to stand by Trump, too.

The Journal is widely perceived as right of center politically, with a reputation for pin-striped rectitude. In short, they don’t make things up.

When the paper has taken a big swing at exposing wrongdoing – do you remember John Carreyrou’s exposé of the blood-testing company Theranos, by any chance? – their reporting holds up.

All of that made JD Vance’s complaints ring awfully hollow after the birthday card story ran.

“Forgive my language, but this story is complete and utter bullshit,” Vance posted on X shortly after it published. “Does anyone honestly believe this sounds like Donald Trump?”

- Trump worked to kill a story about his friendship with Epstein. Now we know why, by Margaret Sullivan, TheGuardian.com, July 18, 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）