Pull Yourself Up by Your Bootstraps

Originally meant the exact opposite of today's encouraging, can-do sense. In 1834, a Tennessee inventor named Nimrod Murphree took out a newspaper announcement claiming he'd invented perpetual motion. A rival paper, the Mobile Advertiser, mocked him in print, joking that he'd probably also managed to hoist himself over the Cumberland river "by the straps of his boots." The phrase spread from there as a byword for a physically impossible boast, reinforced by an 1888 physics textbook that used "why can't a man lift himself by pulling up on his bootstraps?" as a stock example of a logical impossibility. The shift to today's meaning, describing something difficult but genuinely achievable through self-reliance, only developed in the early 20th century.