slow burn

noun

Informal.

1. a gradual building up of anger, as opposed to an immediate outburst.

   I did a slow burn as the conversation progressed.

slow burn

noun

1. a steadily penetrating show of anger or contempt

Idioms and Phrases

Slowly increasing anger. It is often put as do a slow burn, meaning “gradually grow angrier,” as in I did a slow burn when he kept me waiting for three hours. The burn in this idiom comes from burn up in the sense of “make furious.” The term was first cited in 1938 and was closely associated with comedian Edgar Kennedy.

Example Sentences

The author’s slow burn of the tragic chronology, from Mulholland’s famous “There it is. Take it” quote when he unleashed water from the Owens Valley in 1913 to slake the city’s thirst, to how L.A. quickly forgot the disaster, compounds hubris upon hubris.

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Fourteen itemized complaints, most concerning fiscal matters, are presented with sobriety, plus a slow burn of understandable anger.

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That slow burn, with its attendant low hum of fear and anxiety, is achieved onstage largely through misdirection.

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But for the audience, those sentiments more accurately reflect Ramsay’s film, a slow burn that exhausts its welcome and dies in a blaze after losing its grip on a meandering narrative.

Read more on Salon

However, “that will be a slow burn.”

Read more on The Wall Street Journal

Related Words

• acrimony 
• animosity 
• annoyance 
• antagonism 
• displeasure 
• enmity 
• exasperation 
• fury 
• hatred 
• impatience 
• indignation 
• ire 
• irritation 
• outrage 
• passion 
• rage 
• resentment 
• temper 
• violence