Yeah, even though it's only four letters long, by the time I had typed the 'i' I was already thinking 'oh it's probably the other one'. Yes, I think that fast.
"Bite the bullet" refers to doing something you'd rather not...toughing it out. Refers to the custom of biting on a lead bullet while the field surgeon tended to your battle wounds.
Perfectly legitimate indeed. In the scholarly world we always say, don't cite Wikipedia, but when looking up info, we always go for Wikipedia. Like with everything one just has to check the sources.
I'll check Wikipedia, but won't cite it. I'll check the source they reference and cite that if legitimate, not the anonymous pulse holder who wrote and counter-wrote the article with 1,317 other random passers by.
I tried "big one," then "bullet" before hitting "dust." But bite the bullet does not mean die. It means to do something unpleasant for a greater reward later or for the common good or simply because you should.
If "bite the big one" had been the intended answer I would probably have gotten it eventually, but I got "bite the dust" much faster with a little assistance from Freddie Mercury.
"Sleeps with the fishes" does not mean drowned, but disposed of in a body of water. That was Luca Brasi's fate: after being garroted, Sollozzo and Tattaglia saw that his body was dumped in the East River or some other nearby river or bay.
^yeah, what this guy said. "Bite the bullet" means you get over your anxiety or you accept the consequence for something and find the nerve to do it. It has nothing to do with dying... unless maybe you were trying to find the nerve to shoot yourself. But usually it's not that literal.
Yeah, what both guys said. I thought bite the bullet referred to giving a patient a bullet to bite on while someone did a painful procedure such as digging out shrapnel or a bullet. It came to mean facing up to something unpleasant in order to get it over with.
I think the QM's acceptance of the rude going ____ up should be rescinded. Like Bite the Bullet, it doesn't really mean dying, in this case it just means going catastrophically wrong.
Nah, the idea behind the expression is not that every time one is tits up it's bad--sometimes, it's quite good!--but that it's bad because one is stuck that way permanently, as when dead. Otherwise, where would the expression come from?
How is "It ain't over till the fat lady sings" a cliché about death? The fat lady sings at the opera, not at a funeral. This expression just means that it's not over until it's over.
The full expression is more like "Stick a fork in it, it's done" to mean something is finished or dead. I believe you may be thinking of "put a sock in it," which is a reference to gagging someone to make them shut up.
I literally just spent a full minute wondering why having porn experience might be relevant to you knowing the phrase "stick a fork in it". I think I need new glasses.
I read Regency romances sometimes and I frequently see the expression, "Stuck his spoon in the wall," to mean death. No idea why it signifies death. Just wondering, is the expression still used in the UK?
I think this quiz would be better suited to a title and description switch out all the uses of cliche to euphemism or a form of it. While these are considered cliche in a way, I just think a better word for them is euphemisms.
Perhaps this is embarrassing for me, but I've never realized that "bought the farm" is about death. I took it quite literally and thought it was about buying something big and expensive :P
The Monty Python parrot sketch would be a fruitful source of suggestions for this quiz, e.g. shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bite_the_bullet
I also tried Bought the Ticket, you know, as in the one you get from the ferryman ;)
you're all welcome