One that is in a completely hopeless or useless condition. You might as well say it's about that dude who claimed to catch bullets out of the air in his teeth. That one would of course make no damned sense, since no one would equate that task with resolutely doing something unpleasant. The only other popular theory has to do with the preparation of bullet before firing (in old carbine rifles, you had to bite a paper cap off the cartridge so the spark could reach the gun powder). And thank God for that, as we would hate to think that a soldier being operated on with no medication in the middle of a battle is some kind of pussy-ass cloth biter.īut, notice how we said "All signs point to yes" and not a definitive "yes." Nailing down the origins of these sayings is an inexact science. Thus, "Bite the bullet."Īll signs point to yes. Of course, you could use a belt or shirt but even in the throes of death it's important for a man to look like a badass. So, rather then stabbing a patient in the arm to distract him from the saw going through his foot, the surgeon would supposedly shove a bullet in his mouth and ask him to bite down. And sometimes, there's no time for anesthesia when the Nazis are bearing down. When engaged in war there are times when emergency surgery is needed: Legs have to come off or deeply-buried bullets need to come out. As in, "You're going to have to bite the bullet and admit you killed that hooker." 9 "Bite the Bullet"Īccepting something difficult or unpleasant. We tried digging up evidence that they were using actual severed thumbs for the task, but even that turned out to be too awesome to be true. The truth of the phrase is that it likely just refers to carpenters and tailors who, without a ruler handy, would just measure things in thumb-lengths. Maybe it was already an urban legend back then. So why would Gillray create this poster if the ruling it referenced didn't exist? Who knows. Still, roughly a year after the supposed ruling, British satirist James Gillray called out Buller in this cartoon, selling his thumb-width wife beating sticks: This is the stuff that white trash dreams are made of.Īs it turns out there isn't any record of Buller actually making this ruling, though he was known to be a big powdered wig-wearing dickhead to everyone around him regardless of sex. As in, "The rule of thumb is one part tonic to four parts gin."ġ7th century English Judge Sir Francis Buller, who allegedly ruled that it was A-OK for a husband to beat his wife with a stick, given that said stick was no wider then his thumb.
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