The Universe of Discourse

Tue, 31 Jan 2006

Petard
A petard is a Renaissance-era bomb, basically a big firecracker: a box or small barrel of gunpowder with a fuse attached. Those hissing black exploding spheres that you see in Daffy Duck cartoons are petards. Outside of cartoons, you are most likely to encounter the petard in the phrase "hoist with his own petard", which is from Hamlet. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are being sent to England with the warrant for Hamlet's death; Hamlet alters the warrant to contain R&G's names instead of his own. "Hoist", of course, means "raised", and Hamlet is saying that it is amusing to see someone screw up his own petard and blow himself sky-high with it.

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This morning I read in On Food in Cooking that there's a kind of fried choux pastry called pets de soeurs ("nuns' farts") because they're so light and delicate. That brought to mind Le Pétomane, the world-famous theatrical fartmaster. Then there was a link on reddit titled "Xmas Petard (cool gif video!)" which got me thinking about petards, and it occurred to me that "petard" was probably akin to pets, because it makes a bang like a fart. And hey, I was right; how delightful.

Another fart-related word is "partridge", so named because its call sounds like a fart.

[ Update 20260202: Some corrections ]

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