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It is a point of honour in some regiments, among the grenadiers, never to cry out, or become nightingales, whilst under the discipline of the cat of nine tails. Literally biting a bullet does, in fact, date from before the American civil war, as this definition of ‘nightingale’ in Francis Grose’s Classical dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 1796 asserts: He uses a shell casing to cover the exposed nerve the slug is removed from the bullet, the cap was hit to expend that charge, and the casing was cut down to allow it to sit level with his other teeth. One of the characters has a broken, aching tooth and cannot get treatment. The phrase was used in a literal sense in the 1975 film Bite the Bullet.
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It is possible that the phrase evolved from the British expression “to bite the cartridge”, which dates to the Indian Rebellion of 1857 but the phrase “chew a bullet”, with a similar meaning, dates to the eighteenth century. It has been suggested that the idiom is derived historically from the practice of having a patient clench a bullet in their teeth as a way of coping with the pain of surgery without anaesthetic, though it was more common to bite a leather strap during surgery. The phrase appeared again, this time in the drawing rooms of the English upper classes, where Bertie Wooster, speaking to Jeeves in The Inimitable Jeeves, 1923, says: “Bite on the bullet, old man, and don’t let them think you’re afraid.” ‘Steady, Dickie, steady!’ said the deep voice in his ear, and the grip tightened. Kipling wrote a dialogue in that novel, which uses the expression where no actual bullet was involved but where grit and fortitude can be gained by biting a bullet: In that novel the term means to show courage, display a stiff upper lip, a very Victorian attitude. It was the Nobel prize-winning writer’s first novel, set in North Africa during one of the British Empire’s campaigns. The first appearance of the term “bite the bullet” was in the 1891 novel, The Light that Failed, by Rudyard Kipling. You may say something like: “I have to make two people redundant and I know they are going to hate me for the rest of their lives, but I just have to bite the bullet and call them in this afternoon.” Origin of the idiom “bite the bullet” To bite the bullet means to face up to something you have to do and can’t avoid, regardless of how difficult that may be, and to accept the consequences, no matter how unpleasant they may be. Each Shakespeare’s play name links to a range of resources about each play: Character summaries, plot outlines, example essays and famous quotes, soliloquies and monologues: All’s Well That Ends Well Antony and Cleopatra As You Like It The Comedy of Errors Coriolanus Cymbeline Hamlet Henry IV Part 1 Henry IV Part 2 Henry VIII Henry VI Part 1 Henry VI Part 2 Henry VI Part 3 Henry V Julius Caesar King John King Lear Loves Labour’s Lost Macbeth Measure for Measure The Merchant of Venice The Merry Wives of Windsor A Midsummer Night’s Dream Much Ado About Nothing Othello Pericles Richard II Richard III Romeo & Juliet The Taming of the Shrew The Tempest Timon of Athens Titus Andronicus Troilus & Cressida Twelfth Night The Two Gentlemen of Verona The Winter’s Tale This list of Shakespeare plays brings together all 38 plays in alphabetical order. Plays It is believed that Shakespeare wrote 38 plays in total between 15.