In Virginia Woolf's "Jacob's Room" (1922), Timmy Durant stops worrying about his friend Jacob Flanders: “There are things that can't be said. Let's shake it off.” This made me think, of course, of Taylor Swift's song "Shake It Off" ("1989", 2014), and of Wilco's song "Shake It Off" ("Sky Blue Sky", 2007), but I also wondered how old the expression is. — It's very old: The earliest reference in the Oxford English Dictionary is from William Langland's fourteenth-century Middle English poem "Piers Plowman": "And shryf þe sharpliche and shak of alle pruyde." The second is from Myles Coverdale's 1535 translation of the Bible: "Shake of the duste from your feet" (Mark 6:11). (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 25 July2025)