Hoist by One’s Own Petard

Definitions

Hoist by One’s Own Petard

(1)[Dictionary Definitions]:

• [after Shakes. Hamlet] blown up by one’s own bomb, ruined by one’s own devices against others. (Oxford Dictionary)

• ‘To be caught in one’s own trap: ‘The swindler cheated himself out of most of his money, and his victims were satisfied to see him hoist by his own petard.’ A ‘petard’ was an explosive device used in medieval warfare. To be hoisted, or lifted, by a petard literally means to be blown up.’ (Bartleby, The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy).

• The phrase comes from a passage in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Rosencranz and Guildenstern are sent with Hamlet to England bearing orders that Hamlet be killed. Hamlet alters the orders so that Rosencranz and Guildenstern are killed instead. Hamlet says:

For ’tis the sport to have the engineer

Hoist with his own petard; and ’t shall go hard

But I will delve one yard below their mines,

And blow them at the moon. (Hamlet III.iv.206ff, spelling modernized)

The hoist in the passage is not the same as our modern ‘hoist’; it’s an older form of the word, hoise, with a participial ending that ends up as a -t (it would normally be written hoised). Petard is a word for ‘bomb’ that etymologically means ‘farter’, amusingly enough. (R.Clayton, Maven’s Word of the Day)

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