The command shut up is often followed by another. Maybe people would be better at standing up and talking if we hadn’t been told to sit down and shut up for the first quarter of our lives. Shut up appears in other more forceful phrases, such as sit down and shut up. If you cant say anything nice, please shut up. In general, shut up is often seen as a disrespectful way to dismiss someone. This can range from someone making a distracting noise while you’re trying to work to stopping people from going on and on about something to trying to silence them because they are voicing an objectionable opinion. We’ve also devised lots of ways to intensify shut up, including shut the hell up and shut the fuck up, found as the internet acronyms STHU and STFU in the early 2000s. In the late 1980s, Shut up! became a popular dramatic exclamation for “Get out of here!” or “I can’t believe what you’re telling me!” It’s based on the idea of shutting one’s mouth, an expression actually recorded in the 1300s.īy the 20th century, shut up, while widely used in all sorts of squabbles, had become considered a very childish, impolite, or angry-sounding command-depending on tone and context, of course. For instance, if a person was receiving praise they liked hearing but wanted to feign humility, they might, with a bat of the hand, bashfully say, “Oh, shut up.” In the early 1800s, we can find authors like Jane Austen and Charles Dickens more neutrally using shut up for “silencing someone.” The verb had taken on rude tones by the 1820s. Back in the 1400s, shut up was a verb phrase meaning “to secure something away in a receptacle.” By the 1500s, shut up had evolved to variously mean “confine someone,” “close a door or window,” or “bring to a conclusion.”

O and o shut up