Ok this phrase has NEVER made sense to me….you physically can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps. How did it become such a common idiom for (as I’ve heard it) “putting in hard work without help to earn a better life”? Seems counterintuitive
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First off, correct it is impossible to pull yourself up by pulling on straps on your boots
Okay, so it originally started because people would *ironically* say someone’s better off trying to pull themselves up by their bootstraps (kinda like telling someone they’d be better off jumping from a bridge) – that what they’re currently doing now is worse than pulling at your shoes trying to do something literally impossible.
Then over time as people continue using the phrase, the origin of it is kind of forgotten and bent to mean just doing hard work. Because that’s what their relatives had done to them where they were. Dedicated work. Except they forget that their relatives were incredibly lucky the dedicated work had paid off in the way it did, and was the one exception case while it was realistically impossible
So you get a bunch of disconnected rich guys saying (as advice) to literally do the impossible to succeed, and that it’s not that hard. Then other people take what the rich are saying and echo it further
It’s like a bad game of telephone, except it’s the meaning that gets changed rather than the words themselves
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