The word “petard” isn’t one we encounter much in the wild anymore. When it does turn up, it’s usually in a metaphorical sense, as in “hoisted with one’s own petard.”
That very phrase recently caught the attention of our listener Peter Caplan, who wrote to us with a usage question:
“In a column in The New York Times, Pamela Paul used the expression ‘hoisted with one's own petard.’ Is this proper usage? I thought the term, which I believe comes from Hamlet, is ‘hoist with one’s own petard.’”
Caplan’s isn’t the only petard-related email we’ve received recently. Another listener forwarded us a Facebook discussion in which people were arguing about whether a petard is a sword. It’s not a sword.
A “petard” is a bomb that was used to open a door or gate. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the expression “hoist with or by one’s own petard” as “blown into the air by one’s own bomb hence injured or destroyed by one's own device for the ruin of others.”
Basically, you were trying to ruin someone else with a scheme or weapon, but in the end, you hurt yourself.
As Caplan pointed out, this expression goes back to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In the play Hamlet says, “Tis the sport to have the engineer hoist with his own petar.”
You’ll notice that Shakespeare used the archaic spelling “petar.” In current usage, “petard” is much more common. Shakespeare also used “hoist” which brings us to back to Caplan’s question: “Hoist” or “hoisted”?
To hear that discussion, listen to the audio above.
