hoist by one's own petard
sagehen
sagehen at WESTELCOM.COM
Sat Jul 15 20:44:26 UTC 2006
>I realized that I was probably making some kind of mistake, but, I'm
>on vacation. Well, I guess that I could have googled it. I've seen an
>illustration of a petard - in this case, the petard was being used to
>blow down the door of a castle. So, I knew that it was a kind of
>large, primitive, shaped-charge bomb. And, given that "petard" is also
>a word for a gigantic fart and knowing Shakespeare's penchant for
>punning, I basically stabbed in the dark as to whether a person would
>be lifted "by" or "on" a petard. My choice was primarily influenced by
>those cartoon explosions in which the character caught in the
>explosion floats _on_ the cloud of expanding gasses.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I had forgotten that /pet/ was also fart in French. /Pet de nonne/ is a
sort of doughnut.
AM
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