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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Whilst clearly total nonsense (you’re not wrong at all) it’s become entrenched by the uncritical thinking that goes with a cool word or phrase, so means the opposite of what it means. Take the Americanism “I could care less” compared with the more widely and logically used “I couldn’t care less”, for instance. It means it’s opposite to Americans and sounds silly to the rest of us.
Anyway, just to fill in info, that’s why computers “boot up”, it’s used in the sense that they have to get running from a cold start, so a bit at a time, layer by layer they start from scratch. It was originally used with some irony/tongue in cheekness but nobody had anything better, so it stuck (like “virus” then “viral”, metaphors from life)
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