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Ask most Calgarians and they probably don’t know what a petard actually is. But they do have a vague inkling Justin Trudeau might be about to get hoisted on his.

It’s one of those vagaries of the English language that some weird sayings stick around, while more common utterances follow the dodo into extinction. It seems there must be something about being hoisted on one’s own petard — a phrase first appearing from a passage in Shakespeare’s Hamlet — that touches a common emotion, even if the individual words themselves have passed from common usage.

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A petard is a small bomb. To be hoisted on it essentially references poetic justice, in common parlance perhaps a suicide bomber blowing himself up with his own explosive device before getting in place to do savagery to others would be a suitably apt example.

Yes, indeed, we rather enjoy watching others reap what they sow, to use a similar expression. That’s especially true if such self-inflicted misfortune happens to those of a particularly pompous nature, whose fake sincerity and excess sweetness oozes over us as if we’d bitten into one of those deep-fried ice cream concoctions often found at the Stampede. (The type you often say Yahoo to for a second time 60 minutes later).