8 Expressions using BITE in English

An idiom is an expression whose meaning is not predictable from the meaning of the words it contains. For example, “It’s a biting wind today“ does not mean that the wind is going around chewing on people! In this lesson, I will introduce you to eight common idioms that use the word “bite“. There are just eight examples in this lesson, as I didn’t want you to bite off more than you could chew! So go ahead, bite the bullet: watch the video, and take the quiz at TRANSCRIPT Hi. This is Gill at , and today’s lesson is giving you eight different expressions, using the word “bite“. Okay? So, first of all, to give you the literal meaning of “bite“, in case you don’t know the word: If you bite something, you do that. Okay? You either bite... Maybe bite into an apple, or hopefully you don’t bite your fingernails, which is a very bad habit. But it’s always to do with “mm, mm, mm“, doing that. Okay, so that’s the literal meaning of “bite“, but the examples here are expressions, which means metaphorical meanings, metaphors, idioms, so they’re particular ways of using the word “bite“, which sometimes create a picture in your mind, which expresses the idea in quite an interesting way. Okay, so let’s have a look at the first one. So, if someone says: “Oh, that woman, she bit my head off!“ Obviously, it’s not literal. It’s not the literal meaning. She can’t have literally bitten your head off; it would be impossible, because her mouth wouldn’t be big enough, to start with, to go like that. But it means if you say something to somebody, and they just reply in a very bad, aggressive way, unpleasant, like: “What do you mean?“ or “Oh, don’t bother me now, I’m busy“, things like that, that’s called “biting somebody’s head off“. Okay? You go to them in a friendly way, and you get this unpleasant response, so that’s “biting somebody’s head off“. Or, if you say: “Oh, oh I do like that picture up there“, and someone else says: “Ugh, it’s dreadful! How can you possibly like that? Stupid of you to like that picture“, that’s really, you know, biting somebody’s head off when you’ve just expressed a... You know, a nice, pleasant opinion about a picture. So: “biting somebody’s head off“. Right, okay. Enough of that. Oh, and then the next one almost follows, because: “She bit my head off!“, “I had to bite my tongue.“ Which means... Mm. It’s not literally “mm, mm, mm“, biting your tongue, but if you bite your tongue, you’re holding your tongue with your teeth, it means you can’t speak. So, when this woman bites your head off, rather than you reply and say: “Don’t be so horrible“, and then some argument begins - instead, to avoid it getting worse into an argument, or a fight or anything like that, you bite your tongue. “I had to bite my tongue.“ Just keep quiet, don’t say anything, because it will only make the situation worse. Okay. So: “She bit my head off!“, “I had to bite my tongue.“ Okay, so they almost belong together, there. Okay. Next one: “We’ll have to bite the bullet.“ Okay. Now, this is quite a tricky one, but “to bite the bullet“, a “bullet“ is what you have in a gun that fires. So, that sort of shape. A metal bullet with maybe gunpowder inside, something that explodes or hits, hopefully not another person. Okay. But “to bite the bullet“, it means sort of catching the bullet in your mouth before it goes through the back of your head. It’s horrible to think of, but there’s a... There’s a circus trick, I think, where in the circus somebody stands and they have a gun firing at them, and they catch the bullet in their mouth. I don’t know how that works. I don’t know if it’s real, or whether it’s just imaginary. I don’t know how somebody can catch a bullet in their mouth, because it must be going very fast. But anyway, “to bite the bullet“, it sort of suggests that circus trick, but what it really means is we’ve really got to tackle a problem. There’s a problem, we have to deal with it, tackle it. So, we’ve got to bite the bullet. We’ve got to sort this problem out. Maybe in your home, there’s some repair... The roof. The roof needs to be repaired, the rain is coming through, and you don’t know how to deal with it, but you just say: “Look, we’ve got to do this. We can’t just have rain coming through every day. We’ll have to bite the bullet, go and find some company who will come, and we’ll have to pay them thousands of pounds for them to fix it, but we’ve got to do it.“ So that’s “biting the bullet“. It’s, you know, something you don’t really want to have to do, but you’ve got to do it. Okay. Next one: If you’ve “bitten off more than you can chew“... And “to chew“ is what you do when you’re eating food. The food is in your mouth, and you’re doing... You’re chewing it with your teeth. Right? If you bite off more than you can chew...