Surprisingly, this metaphor isn’t recorded before 1530, in a French phrase, but the idea behind it is found in the Bible (Job 4:14-15): “Fear came upon me, and trembling . . . the hair of my flesh stood up.” The hair on cats, humans, and other animals can stand on end and become rigid with fear, or try to – the little muscles controlling this reaction work so well that even bald-headed men feel a prickling of the scalp from sudden terror. An English clergyman at an execution in the early nineteenth century observed the following: “When the executioner put the cords on the criminal’s wrists, his hair, though long and lanky . . . rose gradually and stood perfectly upright, and so remained for some time, and then fell gradually down again.”