But its modern meaning is more closely associated with guns. Fizzle: In the late Middle Ages, “fizzle” was an onomatopoeic word used when someone surreptitiously passed gas.And politicians are often urged to bite the bullet and compromise - suggesting that coming together to pass legislation is as painful as amputation while fully sentient.

His 1891 novel “The Light That Failed” includes this line: “Bite on the bullet, old man, and don’t let them think you’re afraid.” These days, people are more likely to bite the bullet if they have to accept an unpleasant truth. British writer Rudyard Kipling is thought to have been the first to use the expression figuratively. Bite the bullet: Meaning to power through something unpleasant, the term comes from the practice of providing wounded soldiers a bullet to clench their teeth on while they underwent surgery without anesthetic.Consider this list, presented as bullet points - which are themselves so conventional, so central to the typography of mind-numbing PowerPoint presentations, that you can forget what their shape represents. Indeed, the way we Americans casually, often unthinkingly, incorporate gun metaphors into our everyday slang says a lot about how deeply embedded guns are in our culture and our politics, and how difficult it is to control or extract them. Sometimes it’s the offhand remark that’s the most telling. Jones is the author of “ William Clark and the Shaping of the West” and “ Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation.” I think a more approximate expression of the desired meaning would be, to grasp the nettle.Landon Y. Biting on a bullet doesn't seem much of a panacea. Imagine having your leg amputated, without anaesthetic, probably on a battlefield. (Never mind the lead poisoning.) It suggests bravery. We just have to bite the bullet, someone says, meaning get on with it, just do it.īut the phrase comes from the habit of offering people undergoing primitive surgery without anaesthetic a bullet to bite (after copious draughts of brandy or rum), so they would have something to grit their teeth on. It is usually meant to forge ahead through difficult circumstances. (And adding ''to coin a phrase'' does not make an expression any less a cliché.)īiting the bullet is one of these. Which doesn't arise with the plague.īut there are some phrases which are not just clichés but get hold of the wrong end of the stick. The problem is, these are matters of taste. Shun them like one of those chillies called a Scud missile? But people can get addicted to them. Shun them like an episode of Randling? This works very nicely for me, but might not for you, reader, if you are a fan of the show. Nevertheless one should try to avoid them, and I as a writer shun them like the plague - oops. It can be difficult to avoid clichés, since they have a habit of expressing very nimbly what one wants to say.

Meaning of biting the bullet