Dialogue: Taking a long shot pondering the euphemisms of conflict

By JOE BENNETT

"Right," said my mate Nige, "it's time to bite the bullet."

I can't remember what he was talking about, but I can remember what I said next. I said, "What bullet?"

He said it was just a figure of speech and I said I knew it was just a figure of speech but what did it mean.

He said he thought it meant what wounded heroes did in pre-anaesthetic days. Blood would be belching from a shredded thigh and the regimental butcher would be revving up the chainsaw when some soft-heart would draw a round from his ammunition belt and slide it between the teeth of the victim for him to bite on in the clenching agony of amputation.

At which point I said to Nigel that that was all just fine and dandy but it made no sense. Were I being separated from one of my limbs by a bloke whose only medical qualification was a junior carpentry kit from Placemakers, I can't imagine myself biting on anything except the bloke himself.

And if muscular chappies were holding me down to prevent me doing precisely that, I haven't the least doubt I would spend the duration of the operation screaming, partly to drown the screech of the saw and partly to provide a vent for a portion of the pain which would otherwise find its way to the already busy receptors in the brain.

Or else I'd pass out. Either way the bullet would be unlikely to remain between my teeth.

I paused for thought, and Nigel said, perhaps that was the intention.

I said, "What?" and he said Lear (as in King, not Edward) put it neatly: "Where the greater malady is fixed," said old man Lear while standing bare-headed and gloomy in the middle of the storm, "the lesser is scarce felt."

In other words Lear was so unhappy about his nasty daughters that he didn't worry about, or even notice, his hair getting wet.

And perhaps, said Nige, that applied to the bullet-biting conundrum. When the victim opened his mouth to howl, the bullet would inevitably tumble into his gullet and block the windpipe, whereupon the frantic terror of death by asphyxiation and the consequent retching and writhing and choking, all exacerbated by the beefy fellows insisting that the patient remain on his back, would be enough to distract him from the rusty implement that at that very moment was hacking through his sinews, arteries, muscle, bone and all the rest of it.

Then once the sawing was done, he'd cough up the bullet, slap a hanky over his stump, and be careful to keep both as souvenirs to bore his grandchildren with.

"Mmm," I said.

In the end we agreed that we neither knew nor cared about the origin of bullet-biting. It was just another item in the sorry catalogue of dead metaphors.

That my mate Nigel, who has never, I would imagine, fired a bullet, let alone sunk his teeth into one, was nevertheless happy to use a phrase that he had no idea of the literal meaning of, indicates nothing more than that he is simply one of us.

We do it all the time, all of us rabbiting away in strings of packaged phrases that save us the trouble of thinking.

Orwell made it his first rule of good writing never to use a phrase or group of words that one is used to seeing in print.

Well, if we adhered to that little honey of a precept in everyday speech, we'd all sit round the table in the pub as mute as stones. And the 6 O'clock News would be a blessed hour of silence.

We are slovenly. We boast of the incomparable fertility of the human mind, of our linguistic supremacy over the dumb and instinct-driven beasts of the field, yet we issue what we like to think of as our thoughts in the secondhand clothes of those who went before. Strip those clothes away and underneath you'll find a big and airy nothing.

The cliche saves us from bothering to think. It is the verbal equivalent of convenience food and every bit as good for us. It divorces us gradually from the real world of unique actions and unique responses. Our words dull us.

Robert Graves wrote a poem about all this. It's called Hell. I haven't the space to quote it.

The nub of it is that on the rare occasions when fresh words are spoken, as when, say, Shakespeare was nattering with Marlowe over a pint of wallop, the devil comes along and brushes up the crumbs of the discussion and cooks loaves out of them - loaves "to feed his false five thousands day by day".

"Would it have been better," said Nige, "if instead of saying 'bite the bullet', I'd said 'kiss the rod'?"

"No," I said.