get a rise out of someone, to

To provoke to action or to anger. This term probably comes from fishing, in which the angler drops a fly in a likely spot and lets it float, hoping that the fish will rise to the bait. It was transferred to figurative use—that is, getting someone to lose his or her temper—early in the nineteenth century. Thackeray wrote, “Oh, but it was a rare rise we got out of them chaps” (Catherine, 1840).