For the record, I am not proud of any of this.

The scenario: a July parking lot; an oven of a car, the air conditioner blowing hot air in my face; a truly obnoxious driver.

The “obnoxious driver,” in this case, is the jerk in the Volvo waiting for my space. (I’m not exactly blameless, either. So make that two obnoxious drivers.)

I try to back out, but Mr. Volvo hasn’t left me enough room. Instead of backing up to clear the way, he just sits there. When I glance in the rear view mirror, I see that he’s gesturing at me. There’s a look of disgust on his face. I’m not getting out of his space fast enough!

The way he just sits there, refusing to budge, forces me to back into the opposite lane. While I’m waiting, half in and half out of the space, for that lane to clear, I detect more frustration and disgust emanating like stink waves from Mr. Volvo’s open window. Now he’s shaking his head at me.

When I’m finally clear of the space, I roll down my window. We pass each other head-on, driver’s side to driver’s side, like medieval jousters. I slow down as I come up on him. He’s a big sweaty man in a big hot car. Which makes us practically twins.

Anger crawls up the back of my neck like a porcupine. I’m going to give this inconsiderate pig a piece of my mind.

Which I do, in the classic mode of the passive aggressive: sarcasm.

“Thanks a lot for your help!” I shout brightly. I give a queenly little wave of the hand and drive off.

My daughter, who has been cringing in the backseat, says, “Wow. Just, wow.” Her embarrassment is almost as palpable as her mother’s.

“Take a deep breath,” Shana says, with the weariness of eighteen long years of marriage. “Deep breath.”

Much is made of the coincidence of heat and anger. The prevailing wisdom — statistics bear it out — is that violent crime reaches its annual peak in the heat of summer. There are plenty of explanations for this, ranging from the physiological to the social. Medical researchers note that the way the body deals with extreme heat — sweating, increased heart rate, increased production of testosterone — is very similar to what it does when we’re angry. Sociologists point out that summertime tends to bring people outdoors, where they congregate. Increased interaction plus uncomfortably warm temperatures equals increased conflict.

There does seem to be a correlation between summer heat and crime. But the deeper connection seems to be between heat and anger, a preoccupation of philosophers since Aristotle, who proposed that anger actually produced physical heat in the body, hot embers in the blood which caused passions to boil over.

This correlation is encoded in the language of anger. When we’re angry, we smolder, we stew, our blood boils, we seethe, we get steamed, we blow our tops, we go ballistic, we see red, smoke comes out of our ears, we burn up.

And not just in English. People all over the world describe anger in terms of heat. Chinese is particularly colorful in its imagery. Here are a few examples:

“How come that guy’s got such a big fire?” (Why is he so angry?)

“He’s got a roaring fire in his liver.” (He’s definitely hot-blooded.)

“His liver got flamed up.” (He got very upset.)

“His angry gas is gushing into the sky.” (He’s out of his mind with anger.)

My favorite Chinese anger metaphors go so far as to bring hair into it:

“His angry hair is pushing up his hat.” (He’s pretty pissed.)

“He was so angry that he was blowing his mustache.” (See above.)

If you’d like to read more about these and other fascinating Chinese anger metaphors, I recommend a book by Ning Yü, available on Google books, titled The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor, a Perspective from Chinese.

In fact, you might want to keep a hard copy in your glove compartment. That way, the next time you find yourself teetering on the brink of road rage, you can whip it out and share a laugh with a fellow motorist.

Perhaps I could have defused the situation with Mr. Volvo by taking a deep breath, counting to ten, and saying, “I’m so angry at you, my face is Szechuan-pepper hot!”

Hilarious, right?

And if that didn’t work, at least I would have had a nice big book to throw at him.

This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 12 July 2012

For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com