8 Expressions using BITE in English

Hi. This is Gill at www.engvid.com,

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... If it's literal,

you've bitten off a large piece of bread, maybe, and you're trying to chew it, but there's

so much bread, it's sticking out here, and there's more of it than you can get into your

mouth; you can't chew it. So... But this means, in a metaphorical sense, you've taken on a

project, some job, it's a very, very big project,

and you start trying to do it, and then you find:

"Oh my goodness, this is so big, I can't do this. It's too much. Too much for me, I can't do it."

Or you can't do it. "You've bitten off more than you can chew."

You've taken on too much, so you've got to either stop, or get other people to help you, something

like that. Okay.

Next one: "His bark is worse than his bite." Okay?

Now, this sounds like a dog, really,

because dogs bark.

[Barks]

That's not a very good bark, but you know what dogs sound like.

Yeah. And dogs also bite sometimes; they bite people, they bite other dogs, they bite cats,

anything they can get a hold of, really. They like to bite. Okay. But: "His bark"-the sound

he makes-"is worse than his bite" means he makes a lot of noise and it sounds frightening:

"Oo, a big barking noise, oo, help, ah", but he doesn't really bite very much. You know,

he's not dangerous. He can make a lot of noise, but he doesn't really do a lot of damage.

He's not dangerous. So, it can be a dog, but it can refer to a person as well. If it's

a man who shouts a lot and makes a lot of noise, and you think:

"Oh my goodness, what's he going to do?"

but he doesn't actually hit people or hurt people, he just makes a lot

of noise; it's just the sound.

The voice is loud, but the... And the other... You know,

there's nothing much else to worry about. If you can bear to hear the loud voice, that's

all you have to deal with, really. You don't have to worry about being bitten, or hit,

or anything like that. Okay.

Next one, this is to do with the weather:

"It's a biting wind today." Biting.

So, if you're out on a really cold day and it's a really cold wind, and you can feel the cold

coming through, it's as if it's biting you. Okay, with teeth, if the wind has teeth, which

it doesn't, but it feels like cold teeth biting at you, getting in under your clothes. So

"a biting wind", very cold. Right.

"You can only have one bite of the cherry."

Okay? So, a cherry

is a very small piece of fruit that grows on a cherry tree, it's red,

it's very nice, but it's very small. So it

means you can only bite once, and then maybe hand it to somebody else and they can have

a bite, but it's quite small. So, this is something that you can't get a lot from; there's

not much there. You can... A cherry is very nice, but there's not very much of it. Okay.

So, not many opportunities. It's a situation where you can't get much from something.

And then, finally, to describe a person:

"He's a hard-bitten type." Okay? So, this is about

a person's personality, what they are like as a person. If they're hard-bitten...

If they... You know, it suggests they've been bitten during their... Throughout their life,

if they've had a lot of bad things happening to them, it makes them quite hard and self-protective,

not very friendly, not very outgoing. So, if it's someone who's not... Not very sympathetic,

they're a bit cold - they're hard-bitten because of experiences, bad experiences they've had

in their life. They become hard-bitten. Okay.

So, I hope that helps to give you some useful ways of using the... The... "To bite".

If you'd like to visit the website, www.engvid.com, you'll find a quiz there on this subject.

So please give that a try. And please come back again soon for another lesson. Okay.

Bye for now.