“I need to bite the bullet and go back to work next week.”
“Bite the bullet”? What does that slang expression mean? And where does it come from?
It has an interesting history.
In short, it means to do or to accept something unpleasant.
“Okay, I will bite the bullet and contact him.”
But why? Where does this expression come from? Why do we still use this idiom?
We have a way of looking at history through pink glasses.
Oh, how romantic it was back in the days… And the expression “bite the bullet” is said to come from the American Civil War in 1846/1847.
This was before the days of the wide spread usage of anesthetics.
It was believed that injured soldiers were given a big gulp of whiskey and a bullet to bite while a doctor chopped off a limp before gangrene could enter and kill the man.
Biting the bullet should remove the attention from the pain of having an arm or a leg amputated.
Traditionally in history, people were given a wooden stick or a pad of leather to bite. But in a battlefield these things might not always have been easy to come by. A bullet would always be at hand and thus became a good alternative.
If you are wondering if this would not crack a person’s teeth, then no.
Unlike today, bullets were made of lead back then. It is a very soft metal
Lead poisoning was not really a big concern in such situations.
Note that anesthetics did already exist at the time the expression became popular, the first anesthesia started being used in 1846.
But it was not freely available, and it is easy to think that they ran out of it in those field hospitals.
Now, as it often goes, smart business people have later tried to make money with that story.
That might very well have uncovered the true meaning of “bite the bullet.”
Easy money, right?
Sell bullets with teeth marks on auctions. Romantic stories sell and if you make the description right, talk about this poor young man, 20 years of age, who was going to have both legs amputated.
“There were no anesthesia, so he had to bite the bullet.”
“The bullet you can get right here, still showing the marks of his teeth.”
This business caught the eyes of scientists who studied the bullets.
This study from January 2020 found that most of the teeth marks came from animals, not humans.
And when there were human teeth marks present, the bullets were most often bitten or chewed on to mitigate dehydration or to help overcome boredom.
With little proof of this being used at hospitals during the Civil War, we should perhaps look elsewhere.
It has been speculated to derive from the British expression “bite the cartridge” which dates from the Indian rebellion of 1857, but another similar phrase from 1796 “Chew a bullet” disproves that.
So back to chewing to alleviate boredom?
It is such a clear picture, is it not?
Just like the more modern expression “eat that frog” that carries the same meaning. But this one has a history. It includes romance and hardship and war.
So even if it does not derive from the America Civil War, who cares? It is still such a great expression more than 200 years later.
