Ex-Church of Christ Support Board

50heaven wrote: ↑Thu Apr 08, 2021 1:04 pm pulled them up by their petard

Pedantically speaking -
a petard is a kind of bomb.
One is blown up by one's own petard.

One may, however, by pulled up by one's own suspenders.

Generally, the saying is that you pick yourself up by your own bootstraps. That saying evolved into the "bootstrap loader", a computer program that loads itself. Generally speaking, that program is going to be an operating system.

I used to work on a Honeywell 4400 mini-computer, and to boot it (there's the abbreviated form of the term) we flipped a bunch of toggle switches and hit a button. The switches we flipped were an instruction, in binary, to load and execute a program found at a specific address on the drum (like a hard drive, but faster in its day and having less memory). The program was called a bootstrap loader.

Of course, the thing about the expression is that it expressed an impossibility -- you can't actually pick yourself up by your own bootstraps!

It's a whole lot older than computers -

The saying "to pull oneself up by one's bootstraps"[1] was already in use during the 19th century as an example of an impossible task. The idiom dates at least to 1834, when it appeared in the Workingman's Advocate: "It is conjectured that Mr. Murphee will now be enabled to hand himself over the Cumberland river or a barn yard fence by the straps of his boots."[2] In 1860 it appeared in a comment on philosophy of mind: "The attempt of the mind to analyze itself [is] an effort analogous to one who would lift himself by his own bootstraps."[3] Bootstrap as a metaphor, meaning to better oneself by one's own unaided efforts, was in use in 1922.[4] This metaphor spawned additional metaphors for a series of self-sustaining processes that proceed without external help.[