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shrug one's shoulders



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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.
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Example Sentences

Examples have not been reviewed.

But occasionally, it’s a mistake to simply shrug one’s shoulders in response to potentially dangerous rhetoric.

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One might be tempted to shrug one’s shoulders and say “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”

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The simplest way of relief is to shrug one's shoulders and let the weight go.

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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.

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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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