Polyhymnia · Daily Eloquencehoist by your own petard
Undone by the very trick, rule, or trap you set for someone else.
The charm is poetic justice made physical: 'hoist' means blown upward, so you actually see the schemer launched skyward by the bomb he built for someone else.
'Petard' is a fossil word — a 16th-century term for a small explosive that survives in modern English only here, lending the phrase a whiff of antique gravity most natives feel without being able to name.
Where 'it backfired' merely reports a failure, this one stages it — trap, trigger, and comeuppance in five words.
“She pushed through the strict new email policy, then got her own account flagged for breaking it — hoist by her own petard.”
A colleague undone by a rule she personally authored.
“He talked everyone into a no-phones dinner and was the first one caught sneaking a text. Hoist with his own petard.”
A friend caught violating the very rule he insisted on.
Only fire it when the backfire is genuinely self-inflicted — the person's own device turning against them; using it for plain bad luck misreads the phrase. And because it's showy, one well-placed hoist lands where three sound like you're straining for wit.
It hides a 400-year-old word for 'bomb' — and stages the exact moment a scheme blows up on the schemer who built it.
▸More — where it lives, variations, references
Shakespeare handed us this one in Hamlet — the prince gloating that he'll turn his enemies' own plot back on them.
“'tis the sport to have the enginer hoist with his own petard”
'Petard' takes the stress on the second syllable — puh-TARD — and the phrase wants a small relish on that last word, since it's the one nobody quite recognizes.
- · hoist with his own petard (Shakespeare's original wording)
- · hoist on his own petard
- · the biter bit
- · caught in one's own trap