Put up with adversity with good humor. This expression originated as grin and abide. It so appears in Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia (1794), “We have a proverb where no help could be had in pain, ‘to grin and abide,’” so it presumably was a well-known saying by then. A few years earlier W. Hickey wrote in his Memoirs (1775), “I recommend you to grin and bear it (an expression used by sailors after a long continuance of bad weather).” It has been a cliché for about a hundred years, well known enough for poet Sam Walter Foss (1858–1911) to pun on it in his The Firm of Grin and Barrett (“Never yet has any panic scared the firm of Grin and Barrett”).

To smile broadly. The origin of this expression, which was well known in the eighteenth century, has been lost. Most explanations involve the traditional Cheshire County cheese, sold in the shape of a wheel and, perhaps, once so molded that it resembled a cat’s grinning face. Another theory holds that it refers to a Cheshire forest ranger named Caterling who frightened off poachers with his fierce grin. At any rate, the term has been appearing in print since the late 1700s in the works of such writers as William Thackeray and Charles Lamb, as well as in the work of its most famous exponent, Lewis Carroll.