bite the bullet, to

To brace oneself against pain or a difficult experi- ence. This expression is believed to come from the days when those wounded in battle had to be treated without anesthesia and were made to bite on a lead bullet to brace themselves against the pain of surgery. Cer- tainly this was the meaning in Rudyard Kipling’s The Light That Failed (1891): “Bite on the bullet, old man, and don’t let them think you’re afraid.” However, some authorities suggest that the term comes from the practice of gunners biting off the end of a paper-tube cartridge in order to expose the powder to the spark. In times of anesthesia and more sophisti- cated weaponry, biting the bullet became entirely figurative, as when P. G. Wodehouse wrote, “Brace up and bite the bullet. I’m afraid I have bad news” (The Inimitable Jeeves, 1923).