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Reader question: Please explain this sentence: “Finally, his friends told him to put up or shut up.” Put up or shut up? My comments: Put up his fists and fight, or shut his mouth up and be quiet. Essentially that’s what his friends told him to do – to shut up and stop whinging, basically. Usually this kind of advice comes after a dispute or grievance after some time. In our example, the person in question may, or rather must have been complaining about something for a long time. For such a long time, in that, that his friends got fed up with it, and they told him to quit whining and talk no more on the matter. In fact, what they told him is, like I said, put up a fight, i.e. take action and do something about it and if that isn’t happening, then he should just shut up his mouth and never talk about the matter again. “Put up or shut up” comes to be an idiom on the strength of the fact that those words rhyme. The expression is said to have come from the game of boxing. Imagine one boxer taunting another, saying how he will knock the other out in the first round and things like that. The other boxer keeps talking, too, about how much better he is than the other but never says whether he accepts the other’s invitation for a fight, toe to toe. This goes on for some time. The taunts from the first boxer become bigger, bolder, nastier in rhetoric and therefore more hurtful. He called the other names, such as coward, a bum, a monkey and other names sounding worse. | 
