How Would You Pull Yourself up by Your Bootstraps?

To succeed without any help is pretty much what it’s like being a man. That’s if you stretch the definition of ‘success’ to ‘abject failure’. This is what it means to pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps. Which is strange because you can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Still, you know what I like better than anything else? A crazy scheme…

And so I shall endeavour to do the impossible. To find a way to pull myself up by my bootstraps, quite literally. Hey, if they thought it was possible when they came up with this phrase, it’s possible, okay!

The reason why the phrase doesn’t make any sense is because originally it meant ‘to do something absurd’, which gives me a workaround should I opt to wuss out of taking on this question ‘quite literally’. Not that I’m going to do that, that doesn’t sound like me at all.

Ahem.

The ‘bootstrap’ is a little tag of fabric at the back of the boot. But the question does not state that one must be WEARING one’s boots when the act of pulling takes place. You see? I’m not a cheat. I’m a clever, clever boy. Just ask our mam.

So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to impale a lovely pair of boots on a metal spike then PLACE the spike between two posts, like a pull-up bar in a gym. Then I’m going to get pulling…

I am pulling myself up by my bootstraps as these are my boots and those are the straps I’m clinging on to. The biggest problem here is that it’s only a tiny piece of floppy fabric. It would be hard to gain a decent grip. But never fear because, as it turns out, there isn’t really a set size of bootstrap. I could make them as big as I like, you see.

Thus, I could commission a pair of boots with GINORMOUS bootstraps to get my hands into, thus providing me with ample grippage to pull myself up by my bootstraps. Proving once and for all that it is, indeed, possible to do this.

Nowhere in any of this have I cheated. I have succeeded in pulling myself up by my bootstraps. Do you want to argue with me, go on, do you, really, do you, punk?

I get why you might be upset with me. I haven’t acted in the spirit of the phrase. But the phrase doesn’t make any sense anyway since it refers to the act of doing something possible. Thus I have, if anything, fulfilled the original meaning of the phrase. In that I’ve done something absurd but possible, all on my own.

Like any good man.

Yet again, another one of my crazy schemes has put to bed a decades-old phrase that, as it turns out, is not as impossible as it first appears. Sure, the implication is that you’re wearing the boots, but it doesn’t state it explicitly, so there. Sure, do I have sore wrists? Yes. Would the distance between this weakling’s feet and the floor be a mere few inches? Yes. And?

What’s that? Is ‘You’re the Best’ playing in my head as I do this? Why yes, yes it is…

Ciao :)(:

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Post 1,886: But can you find another solution, reader?

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