What a Petard

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How Big Words Can Blow Up in Your Face...
Leave it to Robert Reich to toss around phrases like “hoisted on his own petard” as if we’re all sitting in a tenured seminar sipping Earl Grey and not scrolling Instagram while microwaving leftover chow mein.

Reich—former Labor Secretary, Harvard man, and live human thesaurus—was recently caught describing someone (probably Trump, let’s be real) as having been “hoisted on his own petard.” And while that sounds like a fancy way of saying “got what was coming,” let’s unpack it for those of us who didn’t major in Shakespearean Fart Jokes.

What in the Actual Petard?
First off, a petard is not a fancy cheese or a borderline word for dogs, cats, and turtles on the spectrum.  It’s a medieval bomb. Yeah—like, an actual explosive people used to blow holes in castle walls. “Hoisted,” in this context, means “blown sky-high.” So, when Bobby R. says someone was “hoisted on their own petard,” what he’s actually saying is:

“This guy just got launched into the air by his own homemade grenade.”

When Ivy League Smarts Meet Colonial Gas

Now don’t get me wrong—Robert Reich is a smart guy. But there’s a kind of elite intellectualism that insists on cloaking every simple thought in triple-layered metaphor and a touch of 17th-century pageantry.

A normal person would say: “He shot himself in the foot.”

Reich says: “He was hoisted on his own petard.”
It’s like calling a spilled coffee a “thermally accelerated brown liquid misallocation.” Bro, it’s a sizzlin' dunks daak roast. Settle it down, Shakespeare. 

There’s something delightful about the fact that one of the highest-functioning minds in American political commentary is out here casually referencing medieval explosive metaphors in a 21st-century 'tweet war'. Meanwhile, the rest of us are just trying to remember if we locked the front door or not.

The Real Lesson?
When someone like Reich drops a line like that, it’s not just a turn of phrase—it’s a flex. It’s a way of saying, “I went to Oxford and I want you to know it."

What your friend from Southie would have said was: "Dude played himself. Boom.”
It’s quicker. Cleaner. And doesn’t require a glossary or a Google search. Or, freakin' AI. 

Final Thought from the Boston American Bench
So here’s to you, Robert Reich: King of the Witty Word Bomb. We may not all carry around a thesaurus in our arse pockets, but thanks to you, we now know that even the fanciest insult has roots medieval warfare.

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Stick with The Boston American.
We'll keep translating elite intellect into everyday sarcasm, one petard at a time in our rolling glossary.

​(BTW, did you know the french word for fart is 'pet'? See, it just keeps coming.)

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