Ain't No Way | A Rant
You may as well try your hair, ears, or shoelaces.
»”Say yer prayers, varmint!” — Yosemite Sam
You know how the point is always made about reminding people that language itself transforms and changes as the years pass? Well, sometimes it’s hard being in the middle of those transformative years…watching “literally” evolve to mean both its original definition and, somehow, the complete opposite of literal.
Or the confusion of words…like the honed and homed conundrum. I realize that the latter is now often used in place of both words, but meanwhile I will stick with “homing in on something” and “honing my skills” (or a knife).
But I think the most egregious transformations are the ones that don’t change by degrees. Rather, these words and phrases are shifted ever so slightly, ever so carefully, and ever so strategically until they can be used as weapons. Or propaganda.
This is the time we talk about being asked to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
The modern usage is not just incorrect — it means almost the exact opposite of the original phrase. And that’s because the saying was originally meant to indicate the impossibility of the task.
I imagine that part of this successful misunderstanding comes from the fact that most people no longer associate “bootstraps” with an actual physical object on a shoe. We still have them, of course, but now they’re less commonly associated with boots and are usually called heel loops or tabs.
It’s this thing…. ⤵
Pulling yourself up by those is simply not possible. And it isn’t impossible because you lack discipline or grit or work ethic. It is physically impossible to pull yourself upward by the back loops of your own shoes (side loops on cowboy boots). Shoes or boots, by the way, that would still need to remain on your feet in order to support you once you got yourself to rights.
Somewhere along the way, a phrase meant to mock an absurdly impossible task transformed into a manipulative moral lecture.
When did this happen? The phrase itself dates back to the 1800s. It was originally in print as a joke — almost always used to describe someone attempting an impossible or absurd task. And the readers of that at the time were, of course, people who understood the problem immediately: you cannot lift yourself off the ground by pulling on your own footwear. Ha, ha, ha. What a Nimrod.
But somewhere across the late nineteenth and especially twentieth centuries, the phrase slowly shed its sarcasm and took on an entirely new life as a sincere piece of advice. Now it’s so far gone I’m not sure it can be recovered, because it has gotten so utterly tangled up in the mythologizing of the self-made American success story. The impossibility at the center of the phrase — back when it made sense — has all but disappeared.
Why did this happen? I don’t think this transformation happened by accident, either. A phrase about impossibility is inconvenient within a national culture deeply invested in the idea of its own success. And with that, the idea that the American Dream can be earned entirely through individual effort. Grit. Resolve. Determination.
Just hard work and big dreams.
It is far more useful — politically, economically, socially — to recast struggle as a personal failure or laziness rather than useful commentary on the complex realities of class, education, health, timing, luck, support systems, or opportunity. (And don’t forget generational wealth.)
“Pull yourself up by your bootstraps” survived because it was changed into something simple and pointed. A phrase that was wielded. Because we’d rather congratulate ourselves from our misunderstood moral high ground and throw the systemic problems away along with the baby and the bathwater.
That’s probably what irritates me most about this phrase now. Not only that it changed, because language has always changed and always will. I fully admit that part. But it’s that the transformation stripped away the only honest part of the expression in the first place. And then was used against people.
The impossibility.
Because no one — not a single human being — arrives anywhere in their lives entirely alone. Not without help, infrastructure, encouragement, stability, sacrifice, luck, timing, education, family, community, or sheer circumstance holding some part of the load. We human beings have always relied on one another, even if our modern American culture increasingly encourages us to view dependence or community itself as a weakness.
But I guess that is precisely why the phrase made that change so successfully. A society so focused on personal achievement, individual “me” branding, and endless productivity has very little use for simple, quiet reminders that people are connected and part of a whole. It is so much easier and more convenient to believe that every outcome is earned solely by the individual.
But that original phrase knew better, because some tasks really are impossible alone.
I’d rather be barefoot,
—C.