O que significa shrug your shoulders?

Have you ever seen someone shrugging their shoulders? If you said no, that's probably because you don't know the meaning of the verb shrug. It's very common that people shrug their shoulders when they want to express doubt, ignorance or indifference. When you shrug your shoulders you're doing nothing but moving your shoulders up as you move your head down to show you do not care or are discouraged.

So as you can see, you may shrug your shoulders in many different situations. For example, imagine someone asks if you've seen somebody, but you haven't. So without uttering a word, you simply shrug your shoulders as a way to express ignorance or that simply you do not care. Now imagine someone tells you a lot of offensive things in your face, but you don't seem to be encouraged enough to argue or show any sign of anger. You simply do not care. So somebody asks you: Aren't you going to say anything? Are you just going to let him say whatever he wants? And without saying anything, you just shrug your shoulders. You couldn't care less.

There are a few expressions with the word shrug. One of them you've already seen: shrug your shoulders. But there's also this one: shrug something off. Have you ever heard somebody saying that expression? So let's go back to the last example I gave you. The one where you were being offended but you couldn't care less. You could say that you shrugged the criticism off as harmless. That means you ignored as if it meant nothing. You shrugged it off. Take a look at these other examples: Although constantly troubled by a lack of money, he was able to shrug it off with a joke. The runner has been trying hard to shrug off a back injury that doesn't seem to go away. That's it for now. Talk to you next time!