Idiom "sweat bullets"-----influence of German?

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On 9/2/06, Douglas G. Wilson <douglas at nb.net> wrote:
>
> >A NewspaperArchive cite from 1936 is available.  So that takes out the
> >probability of a US soldier from WWII.
>
> And the way it was used in 1936 was the same as the modern way, without
> explanation or quotation marks, suggesting that it was already widely
> recognizable.

"Sweating bullets" is also listed, without a gloss, in:

"Proverbs and Proverbial Expressions Current in the United States East
of the Missouri and North of the Ohio Rivers" by Margaret Hardie
_American Speech_ Vol. 4, No. 6 (Aug. 1929), p. 471


--Ben Zimmer

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org