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shrug one's shoulders
Idioms and Phrases
Show indecision or indifference, as in When I asked her if she minded staying home, she just shrugged her shoulders . This redundant idiom— shrug means “to raise and contract the shoulders”—dates from about 1450.Example Sentences
But occasionally, it’s a mistake to simply shrug one’s shoulders in response to potentially dangerous rhetoric.
One might be tempted to shrug one’s shoulders and say “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”
The simplest way of relief is to shrug one's shoulders and let the weight go.
If all this effort and expenditure had resulted in success, it would be possible to keep silent and shrug one's shoulders; but when the mode of undertaking this expedition can be clearly shown to have been the direct cause of its failure, silence would be a crime.
Were one of a mocking humor one might shrug one's shoulders; but, in the present state of the Convention, there is no room for anything but fear.
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Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
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