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Ilikepurple

(781 posts)
11. Depends on if you're quoting Shakespeare or using modern English.
Fri May 8, 2026, 04:36 PM
Friday

I thank you for providing this information in such a polite manner. I hope I’m able to do the same as I’m mot trying to cause offense. This is an attempt to put together what info I have on the subject, so read on if interested.
If one is quoting it’s likely originator Shakespeare, it’d be “hoist with his own petar(d),” but if following decades of popular use either “hoist” or “hoisted” is generally accepted. A petard is an explosive device rather than an impaling one, so it makes more sense to say one is hoist(ed) (raised up) “by” or “with” one rather than “on”. When I first read or heard the expression not knowing what a petard was, I imagined someone being lifted after being impaled by a sword. Yet, years after learning a petard is neither not an instrument by which you can impale someone and then lift them up like in Medieval fiction, it still comes to mind before the, let’s say, antics of Wile E Coyote. Wile E Coyote who has made a career out of being harmed by or with his own designs. I suppose he has at times hoisted himself “on” his own petard whenever he’s straddled an Acme rocket to catch the roadrunner, but that has different meaning.
Although “petar(d)has its roots in French, hoise and its past participle hoist (hoised) have there roots in Middle English (Germanic). I don’t believe the expression’s origin is French rather than another attributable to Shakespeare (Hamlet). Hoisted is now the past participle for hoist and commonly used with this expression. Justice Matters’s use here is commonly accepted outside of English literature classes and isolated cocktail gatherings.

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Depends on if you're quoting Shakespeare or using modern English. Ilikepurple Friday #11
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