To shake things up and cause a commotion. Both versions of this term allude to hunting, and to what happens when dogs are set on a bird, rabbit, raccoon, or similar creature. Flying fur is the older image, dating at least from the seventeenth century. “I’ll make the fur fly about the ears of that old cur,” wrote Samuel Butler in Hudibras (1663). Feathers dates from the early nineteenth century. “He’d make the feathers fly” appeared in John Neal’s Brother Jonathan (1825). A somewhat newer variant is fur will fly, meaning a violent confrontation will follow. An Americanism from the early 1800s, it is probably heard more often today than the older terms. A headline in U.S. News and World Report had it on January 18, 1988: “Watching the Fur Fly.”