Indian soldiers were hesitant to do this, because the casings were coated in animal fat and this may have been against their religion. This was difficult to do, so they’d be told to “bite the bullet” to open the casing. In the British Empire in India, soldiers had to separate the casing from the bullet head manually.It may also be derived from the word billet, meaning a stick or a piece of wood. This is like biting down on a leather strap, except they’d literally bite down on a (somewhat soft) lead bullet. It’s a reference to the age before effective anesthesia when soldiers had to undergo painful surgeries or procedures.There appear to be two main theories, both of which date back to around the late 1700s and mid 1800s. So, we bit the bullet and hired a professional. However, we knew that we really knew nothing about this sort of thing. We could have scoured our way through Google and YouTube, trying to diagnose and repair the problem ourselves. This happened to us last year when the central air conditioning system went on the fritz and we couldn’t figure out what went wrong. Even so, you decide to bite the bullet, pick up the phone, and call your folks to tell them the news.Īnother example might be if your home is in need of some sort of repair. You get the sense that your parents are going to be disappointed and this could escalate into quite the conflict. One example might be if you decide to drop out of college. You don’t want to do this thing, and it’s something that you know won’t be comfortable, but you go ahead and do it anyway, because you feel like you must.

“Biting the bullet” usually refers to choosing to endure an unpleasant or painful experience and get it over with, because it’s something that you feel is inevitable and ultimately unavoidable. What does that even mean and where did the phrase “bite the bullet” even come from? Meaning of Bite the Bullet Whether we want to batten down the hatches or run like stink, sometimes we just have to bite the bullet and get it done.īut wait. It’s been a minute since I’ve done one of these Idiomatica posts, hasn’t it? The English language is filled with all sorts of curious idioms that may or may not make any logical sense whatsoever.

Im biting the bullet