You try hauling this petard!

Boot straps. What is that saying, about hauling one's own arse up, about being all stiff-upper-lip-ified, and white-knuckled, too?

Have you any idea how many times the thesaurus, the dictionary, the etymological expert -- have saved me? The ant's forefoot, again. Have you forgotten? Did you never know?

When the mind swings by a grass-blade
an ant's forefoot shall save you
the clover leaf smells and tastes as its flower.
--from LXXXIII, Pisan Cantos

And so, as I sink into real despair, before I am too low to care I search all there is to know about haul, and then muck around in its vivaciousness. Vivacity? (I remember the words my last French students claimed to enjoy saying -- that is, the words whose actual mouth-feel was pleasing to them: vraisembablement, multicolore -- these two were the top choices for partying in the bouche.)

You can haul someone on the carpet. You can haul them in. Over a long or a short haul, you can haul someone over the coals, though most of us prefer to rake. You can haul off and hit someone... but then you'd better haul ass. When you're lounging in the muck of self-pity, you'd best haul yourself up by your own bootstraps.

The 2006 Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea -- to what is not the Oxford a companion, and from whom comes its dictate to be companion to the world? -- says this about the transitive verb to haul:

the seaman's word meaning to pull. Virtually every rope that needs a pull
to perform its function is hauled at sea, never pulled. ‘Mainsail-haul’, the
order given in a square-rigged ship to haul round the after yards when it is
nearly head to wind when tacking. A ship also hauls its wind when it is brought
nearer to the wind after running free.

Hoist is probably richer.

With hoist, I get to use petard.

Of course, hoist with one's own petard has always begged the question of who else's petard would one dare hoist?

Over at the Phrase Finder, I discover a meaning that is unfamiliar: Injured by the device that you intended to use to injure others. Gary goes on to clarify:

The phrase 'hoist with one's own petar[d]' is often cited as 'hoist by one's own petar[d]'. The two forms mean the same, although the former is strictly a more accurate version of the original source. A petard is, or rather was, as they
have long since fallen out of use, a small engine of war used to blow breaches
in gates or walls. They were originally metallic and bell-shaped but later
cubical wooden boxes. Whatever the shape, the significant feature was that they
were full of gunpowder - basically what we would now call a bomb.

The device was used by the military forces of all the major European fighting
nations by the 16th century. In French and English - petar or petard, and in
Spanish and Italian - petardo.

The dictionary maker John Florio defined them like this in 1598:

"Petardo - a squib or petard of gun powder vsed to burst vp gates or doores with."

The French have the word 'péter' - to fart, which it's hard to imagine is unrelated.

Petar was part of the everyday language around that time, as in this rather colourful line from Zackary Coke in his work Logick, 1654:

"The prayers of the Saints ascending with you, will Petarr your entrances through heavens Portcullis".

Once the word is known, 'hoist by your own petard' is easy to fathom.
It's nice also to have a definitive source - no less than Shakespeare, who gives
the line to Hamlet (1603):

"For tis the sport to have the enginer Hoist
with his owne petar".

Note: engineers were originally constructors of military engines.

All this time, I thought the hoist of the petard to be the equivalent of the haul on the bootstraps.

The wonderful thing about the tiny ant's tiny forefeet? They are so small as to not even participate in the ignorance that is bliss. It's a good thing, too, since I am so obsessed with minutia.

Right?