Thing To Do Today: show your mettle.

 The fashion nowadays is to cave in at the slightest difficulty and then moan piteously - or perhaps aggressively - that the world is against you and IT'S NOT FAIR!

This trend does have its advantages. I mean, how easy life is if everything is someone else's fault.

Oh, but I do feel nostalgic for the challenge; for the fight against the odds; the do-or-die; the can-do spirit; the forlorn hope.

The opportunity to show one's mettle.

What mettle actually is, though, I've never had much of a clue. Surely it can't be anything to do with, well, metal, can it? That would be silly.

Wouldn't it?

Thing To Do Today: show your mettle. It turns out that mettle is exactly the same word as metal. The two spellings only diverged in the 1700s. 

I suppose the idea is that metal is shining, strong and flexible, and jolly useful in a crisis.

(Though that does rather depend on what the crisis is. I can't help thinking that this expression was invented by a man.) 

Anyway, the word metal comes from the Latin word metallum, which means mine, or product of a mine, from the Greek word metallon.