bite the bullet
Formsbites the bullet, biting the bullet, bit the bullet, bitten the bullet
- 1To accept a painful or unwelcome part of a situation in order to move ahead.
Like ripping off a bandage in one quick pull to get the pain over with.
Eventually they had to bite the bullet and close the failing store.
She bit the bullet and signed the contract despite her lingering doubts.
Note
The image behind the phrase is probably a soldier's. Biting on a bullet was reportedly a way to keep from crying out during a medical procedure or punishment, though that origin is not certain. The idiom keeps that sense of enduring pain for a purpose. It conjugates like an ordinary verb (he bit the bullet; she has bitten the bullet), and it is often followed by and plus the step taken: bit the bullet and signed.
- 2To accept an undesirable or counterintuitive implication of an argument or view rather than abandoning the position.
Like following a map all the way to a destination you didn't expect, because you refuse to doubt the map.
Faced with the counterexample, she chose to bite the bullet and accept the unwelcome consequence rather than revise her theory.
Utilitarians who bit the bullet here conceded that the theory permits outcomes most people find repugnant.
Note
In argument the choice is often between two moves: give up a premise, or keep every premise and swallow what follows. Biting the bullet is the second move. Evans and Baggett's Moral Arguments for the Existence of God (2014) shows the pattern: a critic might bite the bullet and accept that human dignity does not extend to infants. The unpleasant step of the everyday idiom becomes, here, a cost paid in plausibility.
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Origin
This phrase possibly comes from the reported practice of soldiers biting on a bullet to avoid crying out in pain, usually during a medical procedure or punishment. Other possible origins have also been discussed.