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"Shut up" is a direct command with a meaning very similar to "be quiet"', but which is commonly perceived as a more forceful command to stop making noise or otherwise communicating, such as talking. The phrase is probably a shortened form of "shut up your mouth" or "shut your mouth up". Its use is generally considered rude. ==Initial meaning and development== Before 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".〔Leviticus 13:4 (King James Version).〕 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: 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: In another instance in that work, the phrase "shut it up" is used to indicate the resolution of a matter: The ''The Routledge Dictionary of Historical Slang'' cites an 1858 lecture on slang as noting that "when a man... holds his peace, he shuts up."〔Eric Partridge, ''The Routledge Dictionary of Historical Slang'' (1973), p. 4797.〕 As early as 1859, use of the shorter phrase was expressly conveyed in a literary work: 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'".〔Sir Henry Irving, Frank Albert Marshall, Edward Dowden, commentary on ''The Works of William Shakespeare'' (1888), p. 252.〕 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".〔Rudyard Kipling, "The Young British Soldier", in ''Barrack-Room Ballads'' (1892).〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Shut up」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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