hard pill to swallow
Meaning: difficult to accept; unpleasant truth or reality.
Language: English
Literally: a hard pill to swallow
Category: Food & Drink
Origin: Depends on what pills were actually like before modern pharmacy. A pill was a rolled mass of medicine — aloes, bitter herbs, mercury compounds — with no coating of any kind, frequently large, reliably unpleasant, and genuinely difficult to force down; taking one was a small ordeal endured only because the alternative was worse. That made it an obvious figure for a fact or an outcome someone has to accept while finding it thoroughly disagreeable, and the comparison was already doing figurative work in English by the 1500s. The sugar coating that makes modern tablets easy to take was a nineteenth-century innovation, and it spun off an idiom of its own — sugarcoating the pill — for softening bad news rather than delivering it plain.
More idioms — Food & Drink
- Hair of the dog — A morning drink taken to cure a hangover.
- Das ist mir Wurst — I couldn't care less either way.
- Jetzt geht's um die Wurst — Now it's crunch time — everything is at stake.
- Avere la botte piena e la moglie ubriaca — To want to have it both ways.
- 鯖を読む (Saba o yomu) — To fudge the numbers in your favor, especially your age.
- Enfiar o pé na jaca — To overdo it wildly, especially with food or drink.
More English idioms
- be on cloud nine — to be extremely happy; in a state of bliss.
- get a kick out of something — to enjoy something greatly; to find something amusing.
- sharp as a tack — intelligent; quick-witted; keen-minded.
- run it up the flagpole — to test an idea; to present something for approval or feedback.
- knock on wood — to seek good fortune; to ward off bad luck.
- pull someone's leg — To joke or tease someone by telling them something untrue.
From our proverbs
- He who permits wickedness commands it — Silently allowing wrongdoing makes you as responsible as the wrongdoer.
- The truth is rarely pure and never simple — Reality is complex and nuanced; anyone claiming simple certainty should be viewed with sk…
- Character is what you do when no one is watching — True virtue is shown not in public performances but in private actions when there are no…