Wednesday's Random Slang-o-rama: Bite the bullet

The phrase bite the bullet evokes such an unpleasant image, which suits, given that it's generally defined as behaving "bravely or stoically when facing pain or a difficult situation" (The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer). I can't help but picture an Old West cowboy (or maybe a Civil War soldier) biting on a bullet as surgery is performed to remove a bullet (of course!) from his leg...

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The Dictionary of Idioms strengthens that mental image in this explanation:

This phrase is of military origin, but the precise allusion is uncertain. Some say it referred to the tratment of a wounded soldier without anesthesia, so that he would be asked to bite on a lead bulleet during treatment. Also, Francis Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1796) holds that grenadiers being disciplined with the cat-o--nine tails would bite on a bullet to avoid crying out in pain.

I'll pause here so we can all wince in sympathy.

 

Now, forward, to see if The Phrase Finder has more to say about this phrase, and of course, it does! The post considers several origin theories... all of a military nature... before settling on the "surgery before anesthesia" explanation. Word Histories also has a nice entry and offers several 19th-century appearances, including in author Rudyard Kipling's The Light That Failed, published in installments in 1890. Finally, The Grammarist muses on another possible origin for the phrase, with a nod to my imaginings above about cowboys and the Old West:

Biting the bullet is a cliché of the American Old West, cowboys are often depicted as biting the bullet when undergoing medical procedures without anesthetic. Bullets are made of lead, a soft metal, and biting a bullet was a distraction designed to stop a patient from crying out. The term bite the bullet is older than the 1800s, however, and may actually refer to how early guns worked. Gunpowder and a ball were previously loaded into paper cartridges. In the heat of battle, the soldier would rip open the tip of the paper cartridge with his teeth and pour the gunpowder and ball into his gun. Biting these cartridges and calmly loading a gun in the face of the enemy certainly meant facing a difficult situation with bravery, as in the idiom bite the bullet.

So, there you go. I've exhausted my allotted time to research this phrase, so it's time for me to bite the bullet and get busy on the rest of my to-do list for today.

When the bullet is in flight, don't bite.
Photo by physicist Ernst Mach (1888), depicting the waves around a supersonic brass bullet.
Scan from book (now lost), Public Domain
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15716604