![]() Through presenting several case studies, I flesh out how this grammar, as a deictic expression of/for the unconscious is deployed, reworked, and embodied in everyday interactions. Descriptive, culturally specific, historically informed, and always provisional, this grammar is empirically grounded in lived experience. This article examines how diverse psychoanalytic communities in Buenos Aires have produced unique grammars that influence how individuals articulate ideas about health and well-being. It likely originated with the habit of using one’s teeth to help load a gun, as well as the practice of chewing on a soft lead musket ball to offset thirst, boredom, and pain.Psychoanalysis has produced an ensemble of institutions, expertise, procedures, and practices for rendering the psychoanalytic subject legible and, through this, psychic life as an actionable site of intervention, dislocation, and struggle. To bite the bullet means to face difficulty head-on and with courage. ![]() Let’s Reviewīite the bullet may have had its fair share of overuse through the last century’s habit of painting the Wild West as something to be romanticized, but it has an interesting beginning. It’s a fairly popular term, especially as a pop cultural cliche. Today, it is used to describe facing hardship. No matter whether biting the bullet originates from loading a gun using your teeth or as a means to help bear the pain of something. A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, published in 1976, described “…whilst under the discipline of the cat of nine tails to avoid which, they chew a bullet.”Ī soldier at the Battle of Walloomsac wrote, “… I had drank nothing all day, and should have died of thirst if I had not chewed a bullet all the time….” It is again mentioned as chewing a bullet during the Revolutionary War when whipped as punishment or to help stave off thirst. The first known accounts of the term used in a literal sense were immortalized in Samuel Butler’s poem Hudibras concerning the English Civil War in 1642-1651, in which he describes the “poisoning” of the enemy due to bacterial infection when the soldier’s “chewed” the bullets in advance of firing them: “Their case-shot savour strong of poison / And doubtless have been chew’d with teeth / Of some that had a stinking breath….” Biting these cartridges and calmly loading a gun in the face of the enemy certainly meant facing a difficult situation with bravery, as in the idiom bite the bullet. In the heat of battle, the soldier would rip open the tip of the paper cartridge with his teeth and pour the gunpowder and ball into his gun. Gunpowder and a ball were previously loaded into paper cartridges. The figurative term may actually refer to how early guns worked. Origin of Bite the Bullet Bite the bullet and chew a bullet usage trend.ĭespite the popularity of the wounded biting the bullet hypothesis, the term is much older than the cowboy genre of the 1800s. The soft lead of musket balls also may have contributed to their use to offset the pain of amputation or even boredom. Using teeth to help load a musket was common, possibly leading to the phrase’s origins. The phrase likely stems from Revolutionary times (or earlier) as it has been recorded sporadically through the last few centuries as chewing the bullet in military jargon. In fact, the “biting the bullet” theory and assumptions likely led to the cliche described above since widespread use of the practice has been hard to nail down. This terminology is probably much older than cowboy pop culture made famous in television series and romanticized novels. Bullets are made of lead, a soft metal, and biting the bullet was a distraction designed to stop a patient from crying out.
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