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I realised today that although familiar with the phrase being “hoisted by my own petard” I didn’t know what a petard is.
The ‘hoisted’ bit made me assume it was a kind of rope but now, with decades of wrongness under me, I am exploded by learning that a petard is a bomb.
To thine own self be true
I had originally imagined petard as being someone like a lance or a pike, and that's still in my mind even after learning what a petard is. I always think of someone hung on top of a flagpole by their underwear, not someone blown into the air.
@Perrin42 ah yes, petard sounds like it might be a variant of halberd
I have a hypothesis about that line, that it's intended as a punch line where there'd be audience laughter and applause. The sentence is structured so that its meaning is changed by the very last word (petard), and then it doesn't go cleanly into the next part so you can resume after the laughter.
@passenger I’ve never seen or read Hamlet. My main exposure to Will’s work these days is @shakespearean_Insults
@urlyman Oh yeah, that's a great one to discover! I hope it sticks around for a while because the preciously rare modern-day moments where someone is *literally* (or really, really close to literally) being hoisted by a petard (or something close to a petard) they own are glorious.
@quietmarc I’m a regular malapropper
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