When I catch myself talking a bit too much or too loudly because I’m excited, I gently tell myself to put a sock in it. It’s a silly mental image, so if it’s said with a jovial tone instead of with a harsh bark, the phrase can disarm, not offend. This lighthearted way of telling someone to quiet down comes from our friends across the pond.
“Put a sock in it” is an informal British phrase used to tell someone to stop talking. However, it’s not just for a chatty pal — it also works when someone is being too loud or causing a ruckus. To explain the phrase, a reader wrote to the London literary magazine The Athenæum in 1919: “The expression ‘Put a sock in it,’ meaning ‘Leave off talking, singing or shouting,’ should be included in the lists of ‘Slang in War-Time.’” Indeed, Paul Dickson wrote a book about wartime slang and pinpointed “put a sock in it” to World War I, with the definition of “be quiet (as if one had a sock stuffed into one’s mouth).”
In the 1925 book Soldier and Sailor Words and Slang, however, the writers explain the sock idiom as such: “suggested by the handiest method of gagging a gramophone.” A century before Spotify and Airpods, a gramophone played records by projecting sound through a horn. Stuffing a balled-up sock into the horn would successfully muffle the music from the gramophone.
Still, the author of A Concise Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1993) thought it was unlikely discarded socks would be found around the gramophone in the drawing room (clearly they haven’t lived with teenagers) and put more credit into the soldier-slang origin story: “In a barrack-room, however, socks would certainly be lying around at night and one can imagine a heavy snorer being shouted at and told to ‘put a sock in it’ (in his mouth).” It’s easy to imagine soldiers playing the prank of stuffing a sock in someone’s mouth in a joking threat: “Stop talking or I’ll put a sock in it!”
Whether the origin is a drawing room or barracks, the meaning is the same: We’re putting metaphorical socks in someone’s mouth to muffle their voice. The wry imagery of “put a sock in it” makes it feel like a kinder way of telling someone to stop talking. So if someone does tell us to put a sock in it, we can assume they mean it with love.
More from our network
Word Smarts is part of Optimism, which publishes content that uplifts, informs, and inspires.
