You've probably heard someone say "pull yourself up by your bootstraps." It can refer to any situation in which someone prevails through solitary hard work, and is often used to describe getting oneself out of a difficult situation without any outside help.
There's one problem with the old bootstraps line, though. It actually originated as a sarcastic phrase, used to refer to someone trying to do something that simply cannot be done.
A joke about perpetual motion
According to etymologists, the first recorded precursor to the phrase appears in an 1834 newspaper article. The article was about a man who claimed to have cracked the secret to perpetual motion, an achievement that scientists have long known to be resolutely impossible. In response, the paper teased that he had probably also succeeded in handing himself over a river, or a barnyard fence, "by the straps of his boots."
The term bootstraps generally refers to the little straps on the backs or sides of boots that could be used to help a person pull on their shoes.
"Of course bootstraps wouldn't actually help you pull yourself over anything," linguist Ben Zimmer said. "If you pulled on them, it would be physically impossible to get yourself over a fence. The original imagery was something very ludicrous, as opposed to what we mean by it today of being a self-made man."
A hundred years of poking fun
In the 19th and early 20th century, variations on the phrase appeared a few more times in print, always as a way to poke fun at attempts to do the impossible.
"When steam was turned on, the pressure in both ends of the cylinder was perfectly balanced through this connection and the piston could not move any more than a man can lift himself by his bootstraps," read a paragraph in a 1908 magazine.
A sentence in a literary review, meanwhile, described an act that, "though not so palpably absurd, is still of the same character as the efforts of the man who should essay to lift himself by the straps of his boots."
When you think about it, it's an absurd image: trying to lift yourself off the ground by pulling on a strap on the back of your boots.
How it flipped
So how did this phrase become associated with self-sufficiency?
The first recorded use of the phrase in the context it is typically used in today may be a line in James Joyce's famously experimental Ulysses. "There were others who had forced their way to the top from the lowest rung by the aid of their bootstraps," Joyce wrote in the 1922 novel.
Still, even as it evolved towards its current use, the phrase retained some of its absurdity. A 1927 newspaper editorial made fun of the term "bootstrapper," noting that the feat of lifting oneself by one's bootstraps was, by then, being treated as an achievement rather than a joke.
Somewhere between the 1830s and the present, in other words, a line about something physically impossible turned into a line about grit. The image never changed. Only what we decided it meant.