Bob’s Your Uncle! Origins Of Britain’s Most Obscure Phrases Revealed 1. 'Bite the bullet’ (To have to do something very unpleasant) - Wounded soldiers in WW1 being operated on without anesthetic literally had to bite a bullet to deal with the pain 2. 'Fly by the seats of your pants’ (To do something without a clear plan, to improvise) - Used in a 1938 headline to describe Douglas Corrigan’s 29-hour flight from Brooklyn to Dublin, which was meant to be to California. Corrigan had filed for a transatlantic flight two days earlier but it was rejected because his plane was not considered fit for the job. Upon landing in Dublin he claimed his compass had packed up… 3. 'Go doolally’ (To go mad) - After the Indian garrison town of Deolali where British soldiers waited, sometimes for months, to be taken back to Britain after their tour of duty. There was nothing to do and many may have been suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder 4. 'It’s brass monkeys outside’ (Freezing cold and miserable weather) - ‘Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey’. A ship’s cannon balls used to be stacked on a brass structure called a ‘monkey’; the brass would contract in arctic temperatures and the cannon balls would fall off 5. 'Three sheets to the wind’ (Very drunk and walking correspondingly unsteadily) - ‘Sheets’ refers to the ropes with which a sail is fastened, two per sail. If out of four sheets, one was not properly fastened, the ship would become difficult to control and would be ‘to the wind’, moving as erratically as a drunk 6. 'Separate the wheat from the chaff’ (To distinguish between quality and worthlessness) - The phrase comes from Matthew 3:12 where John the Baptist describes the man to come after him: ‘His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor, gathering his wheat into the barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire.’ In the Old Testament the image of winnowing is also used in Psalm 1:4: ‘…the wicked! They are like chaff that the wind blows away.’ 7. 'Skin of your teeth’ (Barely managing to do something) - Job describes his state (Job 19: 20): ‘my bone clings to my skin and to my flesh, / and I have escaped by the skin of my teeth.’ The phrase suggests something so thin and elusive as to be insubstantial.’ 8. 'Through the eye of a needle’ (To undergo a near impossible process) - From Matthew 19:24; Mark 10:25; and Luke 18:25. Easier for a camel to pass through the eye of needle than for a rich person to get to heaven