Drive you up the wall

A young man in casual clothing climbing up a building wall.
(Photo: Max Flinterman/Pexels | Text: David/ArtisanEnglish.jp)

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Idiom: Drive you up the wall

Well, hello, here’s a question for you: What drives you up the wall?

By that, I mean what makes you feel irritated or angry.

If you say nothing, then I’ll have to call you a liar because we all have things that get under our skin and drive us up the wall.


When something drives you up the wall, it makes you feel irritated or angry.


If it would help to give you some thinking time or jog your memory, I’ll go first.

One thing that drives me up the wall is drivers who quickly pull out into traffic and then slow down.

Whaaa that gets on my nerves.

Here in Wakayama, there are minitrucks everywhere, and 95% of them drive slowly.

That’s understandable; they are usually driven by farmers and most farmers in not only Wakayama but Japan are elderly.

What gets my goat is when they pull out so quickly that they cut me off, and then they slow down to about 20 kph below the speed limit.

THAT drives me up the wall.

How about you?

What drives you up the wall?

Is it dirty chopsticks left on the counter instead of placed in the dishwasher?

Perhaps shoes deposited haphazardly in the vestibule cause your blood pressure to rise.

There are any number of minor things that could irritate you to no end.

You and I both need to learn that it’s useless to become annoyed by the little things.

If we allow the things others do to drive us up the wall, then we lose.

As the British like to say, keep calm and carry on.


Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test

This post is understandable by someone with at least a 6th-grade education (age 11).

On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 81.

The higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100, the easier the passage is to read.


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