16 Angry Phrases in English, From the Movies

In The Lion King, Simba is alone at night when Rafiki, a baboon (a kind of monkey), starts singing near him. It’s the same song again and again, and after a while Simba wants it to stop.

Rafiki answers as if Simba wanted him to cut something off. He’s only joking, but a learner could make the same mistake for real, because cut it out has nothing to do with cutting. It means “stop doing that, it annoys me”.

People who are angry almost never say “I’m angry”. They use short phrases like this one, which everybody knows, so once you know them too, you follow an angry scene much faster.

Here are 16 of them from 11 films, each with the moment when somebody says it.

Angry at nobody

Anger often starts small, with nobody to blame. In Toy Story, Woody opens a meeting of the toys and speaks into the microphone of a toy tape recorder, which makes a loud noise. Hamm the pig says for crying out loud. Nobody is crying, and Hamm isn’t really talking to anyone. It’s a mild phrase that people say to the air when something annoys them.

For heaven’s sake does the same job. In The King’s Speech, the King is dying, and his son David says that his father is doing it now on purpose, just to make things hard for him. The answer he gets starts with this phrase. It sounds soft and a little old, and for God’s sake is the same phrase, only a bit stronger.

A question can be angry too. The Conductor in The Polar Express marks every child’s ticket with letters, and a boy called Know-It-All gets “L-E”. So he asks what the heck that means. Without “the heck” it would be a plain question, and with it he sounds surprised and annoyed. “Heck” is a soft word that takes the place of a ruder one, so the phrase is fine even around children.

Saying what annoys you

None of those phrases says what the problem is. When people do name it, the mild way is a pain in the neck: a person or a thing that annoys you. In Shrek, Donkey and Shrek reach the castle where a dragon guards the princess, and Donkey asks where the “fire-breathing pain-in-the-neck” is. He means the dragon, but Shrek thinks he means the princess.

When something annoys you again and again, it starts to get on your nerves, and that’s stronger. Woody says it to Buzz in Toy Story. Buzz, the new toy, believes he’s a real spaceman, and Woody is tired of it.

Buzz doesn’t hear the anger at all. He asks if Woody wants to send a complaint to Star Command, as if they were in an office. People also say “you’re getting on my nerves” to the person who annoys them. It’s fine with a brother or a good friend, and too much for your boss.

Telling them to stop

When naming the problem doesn’t help, people give orders. Simba’s “cut it out” is one, and knock it off means the same thing. Both are informal, and parents say them to children all the time. Carl’s house in Up is flying, and a boy named Russell is inside, playing with the ropes that turn it. Carl starts two calmer sentences and finishes neither, and then he shouts it. It doesn’t work any better than it did with Rafiki, because Russell’s next words are “Hey, look! Buildings.”

A fight has phrases of its own. In The Pursuit of Happyness, Chris and his son are waiting in line for a bed in a shelter (a place where people with no home can sleep) when a man takes Chris’s place. One of them says back off, which means “move away and leave me alone”, and it sounds tough. It also works for someone who won’t stop asking questions or giving advice.

Then the two men fight, and somebody shouts break it up. That one is only for fights, and it’s what someone outside the fight shouts, like a teacher who sees two boys fighting.

Telling them to go

Sometimes you just want the person gone. Hit the road only means “leave”, and people say it about themselves in a friendly way, as in “it’s late, we should hit the road”. As an order it isn’t friendly at all, and that’s how Jerry uses it in Zootopia. He owns an ice cream shop for elephants, and he doesn’t want Nick the fox in there.

Get lost is the rude one: “go away, I don’t want to see you”. Viktor, in The Terminal, has been stuck in a New York airport for a long time, and his friends there were sure he’d walk out into the city one day. Now he says he’ll just fly home, and Gupta, the old cleaner, tells him to get lost.

A moment later, in front of everyone, Gupta goes further.

You make me sick has nothing to do with being ill. It means “what you do is so wrong that I don’t like you at all”, and it’s the strongest phrase here. Gupta says it because Viktor won’t fight, and right after it, somebody tells Gupta to settle down.

Calming them down

“Settle down” means “stop being so loud”. Teachers say it to a noisy class, so to an adult it can sound like you’re talking to a child.

The phrase everybody tries first is calm down, and the movies are honest about how well it works. In Finding Nemo, Marlin takes his son Nemo to school for the first day, hears that the class is going to the edge of the reef, and panics in front of the other fathers.

Bob means well. But “calm down” tells people that their feelings are too big, and almost nobody likes to hear that. It sounds kinder with a few more words after it, as in “calm down and tell me what happened”.

For someone who is too serious, there’s lighten up, which means “relax and be a little happier”. Back in The Lion King, Scar is king now and keeps the bird Zazu in a cage, where Zazu sings a sad song. Scar tells him to lighten up. That’s hard to hear from the one who put you there. Even from a friend, it can sound like they don’t care how you feel.

The coldest of them is pull yourself together, which means “stop being so upset and act normally”. Hagrid, in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, is in tears because his baby dragon has been sent to Romania. Filch has brought some students to him at night for their punishment in the Forest, and he has no time for Hagrid’s tears.

Filch even starts with “for God’s sake”, so one line has both his anger and his advice. A good friend can say “pull yourself together” kindly, and people often say it to themselves. From Filch it’s an order.

Look back at these phrases, and you’ll see how little they say. “Cut it out” and “knock it off” never tell you what “it” is, and “calm down” never asks what’s wrong. An angry person is sure that you already know. Sometimes you don’t, and sometimes, like Rafiki, you act as if you don’t. That’s how an argument starts, and arguments are a story for next time.