Shut Up - Initial Meaning and Development

Initial Meaning and Development

Prior to the Twentieth century, the phrase "shut up" was rarely used as an imperative, and had a different meaning altogether. To say that someone was "shut up" meant that they were locked up, quarantined, or held prisoner. For example, several passages in the King James Version of the Bible instruct that if a priest determines that a person shows certain symptoms of illness, "then the priest shall shut up him that hath the plague of the scall seven days:". This meaning was also used in the sense of closing something, such as a business, and it is also from this use that the longer phrase "shut up your mouth" likely originated.

One source has indicated this:

The use of the phrase "shut up" to signify "hold one's tongue" or "compel silence" dates from the sixteenth century. Among the texts that include examples of the phrase "shut up" in this context are Shakespeare's King Lear, Dickens's Little Dorrit, and Kipling's Barrack-Room Ballads.

However, Shakespeare's use of the phrase in King Lear is limited to a reference to the shutting of doors at the end of Scene II, with the characters of Regan and Cornwall both advising the King, "Shut up your doors". The earlier meaning of the phrase, to close something, is widely used in Little Dorrit, but is used in one instance in a manner which foreshadows the modern usage:

'Altro, altro! Not Ri-' Before John Baptist could finish the name, his comrade had got his hand under his chin and fiercely shut up his mouth."

As early as the late 1859, use of the shorter phrase was expressly conveyed in a literary work:

A sneering infidel, who uses Scripture for a jest-book, raves about "cant," and retails and details every inconsistency, real or imaginary, that he hears respecting parsons and hypocrites, will be told to "shut up" for a few times; but will, if he persevere, make an impression on a workshop.

One 1888 source identifies the phrase by its similarity to Shakespeare's use in Much Ado About Nothing of "the Spanish phrase poeat palabrât, 'few words,' which is said to be pretty well the equivalent of our slang phrase 'shut up'". The usage by Rudyard Kipling appears in his poem, "The Young British Soldier", published in 1892, told in the voice of a seasoned military veteran who says to the fresh troops, "Now all you recruities what's drafted to-day,/You shut up your rag-box an' 'ark to my lay".