THE CAT'S PAJAMAS XVII

Tad Tuleja

A collection of the (mostly) true origins of familiar phrases.

BITE THE BULLET

This expression does not refer, as has often been stated, to the old practice of having a surgery patient bite a bullet during an operation so he would not cry out in pain. It's true, in the pre-anesthetic era, surgeons offered patients such "pacifiers," but they were seldom made of lead. Lead would be impossible to bite, and a bullet could be swallowed. The usual material, sensibly enough, was leather.

In fact, bullet most likely came into the idiom as a whimsical distortion of belt. We do know that "chewing the belt," in the Civil War, was a synonym for "feeling pain."

Bite the bullet, on the other hand, is a synonym for enduring privation. You bite the bullet when you cut back on expenses - including food. Used in this sense, the expression refers not to the biting of real bullets, but of beans. Because of their shape and their tendency to cause "explosive stomach rumblings," beans have been called "bullets" since just after the Civil War.