shut up and color
v. phr.— «At Squadron Officer’s Scholl they kept emphasizing the helplessnes of the Vietnamese and how we could bomb them at will. When I asked why, if that was true, we negotiated a settlement that basically had us as the losers no one really had the answer. (Shut up and color Capt Felts).» —“Re: Midshipman’s Hope” by Dave Felts Usenet: rec.arts.sf.written Feb. 7, 1996. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when people disagreed over the best word to use when answering the phone. Alexander Graham Bell suggested answering with ahoy! but Thomas Edison was partial to hello! A fascinating new book about...
As noted in Francis Grose’s A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (Bookshop|Amazon), the term red rag, also redrag, is an old slang term for “the tongue,” as in the quotation he cites with a variant spelling of potato: Shut...