Saturday
29 April 2017

— nascent green leaves in the early morning light

Good Morning All,

I remember as a kid one of my uncles using the phrase hoisted on his own petard, but I was too shy to ask what it meant, and then--the next couple of times I heard it—something weird happened: I became in some weird way uneasy around it, as if because I’d not asked my uncle when I’d had the chance I’d somehow squandered my right to get to know what it meant. So I avoided it. Or, when I did hear it again, I’d look out the window and shift my thoughts to whatever was out there, birds, crickets, the turning of poplar leaves in the breeze, whatever.
Whether other people have these specific word-phobias, I hesitate to ask. I have several, including—for no reason apparent to me—Welsh rarebit. Maybe it is because if I ever try to say it aloud I know damn well I’m going to refer to the leporidae in Dylan Thomas territory.

Anyway, good old Hamlet, who created the idiom, bailed me out when I began reading him with the students in 1984. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say: 

"In the following passage, the letters refer to instructions written by Hamlet's uncle Claudius, the King of Denmark, to be carried sealed to the King of England by Hamlet and his schoolfellows Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.  The letters, as Hamlet suspects, contain a death warrant for Hamlet, who later opens and modifies them to refer to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Enginer refers to a military engineer, a bomb maker;  the spelling reflects Elizabethan stress. 

'There's letters seal'd: and my two schoolfellows,
Whom I will trust as I will adders fang’d,
They bear the mandate; they must sweep my way
And marshal me to knavery. Let it work;
For 'tis the sport to have the enginer
Hoist with his own petar'; and 't shall go hard
But I will delve one yard below their mines
And blow them at the moon: O, 'tis most sweet,
When in one line two crafts directly meet.’”

As you may recall, Hamlet just happens to be wearing his dad’s royal signet ring, so he can fake the redone wax seal, and by another happy chance gets a lift back to Denmark with Danish pirates to whom he promises amnesty. 

So, the bomber blows himself up with his own bomb. Which certainly applies to the Dickster.

And one more neat little bit: Shakespeare writes petar’ not petard, the former being at that time a slang word for fart.

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron