Hoist With My Own Petard

For students who are learning English and are puzzled by the use of idioms...here’s an example using the idiom ‘Hoist With My Own Petard.’

Last night I said (jokingly) to Mrs R, ‘Be sure to waken me up to see the ‘supermoon’ eclipse. This was due to happen when the earth’s shadow fell across the moon during the early hours of the morning - when every sensible person should be fast asleep.

At 3.00am the alarm went off. In response to my grumpy ‘What’s happening????’ the response was ‘Well, you wanted to see the moon!’

So, from 3.00am to 3.45 am I was crouched by the open window trying to photograph the moon, which was a reddish colour and slowly diminishing in size as the earth’s shadow passed over it. To make matters worse, the battery on my main camera was not charged, I was battling sleep, handholding a small camera, trying to work out what shutter speed I could get way with, in combination with the largest possible aperture at a modest telephoto that would give me an ISO where the image quality was not drowned in digital noise. Of course, if I had any sense, I would have set the camera up on a tripod...but then I don’t have much sense at the best of times and none at all at 3am.