hoist » host

Chiefly in:   hosted on/by one's own petard

Variant(s):  to be host on/by one's own petard

Classification: English – idiom-related

Spotted in the wild:

  • The bottom line is the New York Times was hosted on its own petard, the politically correct snobs. (link)
  • Come February. Maartan et al will be hosted on their own petard. There will be no where left to run, no one left to buy off, no one left to blame. (link)
  • That is why turnaround stops once the side who started it realizes that they have just been hosted on their own petard and it is not worth the pain. (link)
  • Too late to change it now. And no, I am not one of those writers that will go back and rewrite an already published book years later because I’m not happy with it.
    So what is a writer to do when you’re host on your own petard, and in print? (Laurell K. Hamilton, Ballantine Books / Random House)
  • Unfortunately, a gunpowder explosion rather literally hosts him by his own petard. (link)
  • Perhaps you should get more than just a “bit” [of education], and stop hosting yourself by your own petard in public. (alt.astrology)
  • Whether it was WMDs, Terri Schiavo’s memogate, Abu Ghraib or now this, in their haste to castigate those on the other side other political spectrum, all they ended up doing was hosting themselves on their own petard. (link)

Not a particularly frequent eggcorn. Some occurrences might in reality be (inadvertent) typos, a dropped i that isn’t caught by a spelling checker. But a number of them evokes the image of being placed in or confined to some uncomfortable situation by one’s own doing. The majority of the eggcornish uses employ the preposition _on_.

| link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/07/13 |

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