Bite the bullet
There were a lot of good phrases today, but the one I chose is “bite the bullet.” Oh, before I explain that. Did you hear “upside” and “downside”? If so, you might want to check out Episode 91 at PlainEnglish.com/91, where we talked about upside and downside. That was about the upsides and downsides of killing off a species of mosquito. Upside and downside. But today’s phrase is bite the bullet.
When you do something that you know you should do, you know it’s the right thing, but you really don’t want to—you just bite the bullet and do it. I lost my phone a couple of months ago. I’m not going to revisit the trauma and explain to you what happened exactly, but I lost it. I needed to get a new phone. It killed me that I had to buy another phone. I didn’t have an old one to use. I really had no choice. But I waited a few days, hoping some miracle other solution would come along—but, you guessed it, none did. So, I had to bite the bullet and buy a new phone—ouch. I had to bite the bullet and do what I knew I had to do, even though I really didn’t want to.
I don’t think a lot of people in Britain want to live through another referendum. Another campaign, further division in the country. But there’s really no way to know what people want now without going back to a second vote. The only responsible thing for the government to do is bite the bullet and call a second referendum. They don’t want to do that; I don’t blame them. But it’s the right and responsible thing to do at this point. They need to just bite the bullet and arrange another vote as quickly as possible.
Do you remember Google-plus? It was supposed to be Google’s social network, and without many users, it’s neither very social nor much of a network. In fact, it’s kind of a joke. Actually, kind of a bad joke, since they’ve suffered some data breaches through Google-plus. Google recently decided to bite the bullet and shut down Google Plus. It’s been clear that it hasn’t been going anywhere commercially, and it’s just causing Google headaches with data breaches. They probably didn’t want to admit defeat by closing down their answer to Facebook, but they had to. They just decided to bit the bullet and shut down Google plus. Probably for the best.
That’s it for today. Can you believe it? Another episode is already done, over with. But the good news around here is that there’s always another episode coming up right behind the one you’re listening to. You only have to wait a couple of days. If you’re listening on Thursday, the day this came out, then you only have to wait four more days until Monday for the next episode, special Christmas Eve edition, next Monday, December 24. So join us then, and in the meantime get your last minute gifts and cards for your friends and family. Don’t be stingy! See you back here in a couple of days.
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