Undoings
From Hamlet:
“Let it work,
For ’tis the sport to have the enginer
Hoist with his own petar, an’t shall go hard
But I will delve one yard below their mines,
And blow them at the moon.”
(Hamlet III.iv.206-9)
Undoings
My own memory is such a fickle mistress; I trust her not. But my recollection was a professor explaining this line, in brief, during a presentation. Since then, it shows up time and again, over and over, to the point that I thought it was worthy of a brief explication.
The short version?
“Hoist with his own petar”
More modern amendments?
“Hoisted by his own petard.”
“Hoist” is the past tense of “hoise” which might show up in modern technical terms as “hosed.”
Example? “I hosed that hard drive,” as in trashed, ruined, or rendered unserviceable.
In my vernacular? “Blowed up.”
The “blowed” part is drawled out, “b-looow’d.”
Undoings
It about a demolition expert setting an explosive device in place, only to have that device detonate, hence the “And blow them at the moon” final line in the sentence. The actual character’s passage is a little longer, but I’ve been mulling the term for years now, “hoist with his own petar,” and wanted to make a note of it, for myself.
“Petard” is a mine, a form of ordinance, like a bomb, or, more to mind? Like a round, cartoon bomb with a fuse coming out of the top.
Boom.
As an adjunct, in the play itself, and it was one of the few bits from — I think — the Mel Gibson version that stuck, where the letters are swapped, and the King’s missive of “Kill Hamlet” is replaced with “kill the bearers of these letters,” namely Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
Wikipedia has a larger note, and yet, I wonder if the question is worthy of that, just a side note to the text, and that’s where the phrase comes from, “Hoisted by his own petard,” which, according to my version of the play, reads “hoist with his own petar.”
