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Reader question: Please explain “hair-raising’, as in: “hair-raising time.” My comments: Hair-raising, meaning scary is derived from the fact that when frightened, we feel our skin gets tight, we get goose bumps and feel a chill up the spine. For others, they feel as if their hair is all standing up straight. For instance, Poole, Dr Jekyll’s faithful butler recalls the moment he saw Mr Hyde (in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson): “It was but for one minute that I saw him, but the hair stood upon my head like quills.” Quills, as grown on the back of a porcupine. In other words, Poole is scared, mighty scared. Anyways, when an experience is described as hair-raising, it is scary, frightening or very exciting, depending on context. Which brings up to “hair-raising time”. “Hair-raising time?” These are hair-raising times, don’t you think? In America, for example, people continue to fail to get jobs, more than two years into the recession. Last time I checked, which is actually yesterday, I got these numbers (Jobs: The Crisis Continues, by John Cassidy, NewYorker.com, January 7, 2011): • 4.4 million—that is the number of workers who have “disappeared” from the labor force since the recession began. If all of these folks were seeking work, the unemployment rate would be about 10.7 per cent. | 
