For the uninitiated, the Petard is a suicide bomber unit.
Point of Order: the word "petard" refers to the bomb itself, essentially a primitive breaching charge; the users were called "petardiers." (Not your fault, though, futanaridesu; I blame the game's writers for this.)
On a related note, petards were notoriously unreliable; the petardiers had to advance to the right spot while under enemy fire, plant the bomb, then run the hell away (again, under enemy fire). Between the volatile gunpowder and crude fuses used in petards, there was a very good chance that the petard would go off with the petardiers too close to escape the blast (or even en route to plant it); hence, the expression "hoist by [one's] own petard" literally means "sent flying by [one's] own bomb."
Alanis, hoist by his own petard (again, see the literal definition above)
I mean, the Lord of the Rings perfectly shows how dangerous the job is. And there's also Diplomacy Is Not An Option, in which I accidentally wiped half my army to petards.
Saving Private Ryan also shows just how dangerous dealing with explosives is with the one soldier who dies when the improvised explosive goes off prematurely while attempting to plant it to the German tank.
The funny part about the line "hoist with his own petard", was during Shakespeare's time the audience would have understood two meanings from the line. The obvious meaning as Alanis put it, but also the second cruder meaning which would be as a fart joke. Petard understood as slang for fart in 17th century England, and the word itself is derived from Middle French to break wind which in turn is from Latin of the same meaning.
The funny part about the line "hoist with his own petard", was during Shakespeare's time the audience would have understood two meanings from the line. The obvious meaning as Alanis put it, but also the second cruder meaning which would be as a fart joke. Petard understood as slang for fart in 17th century England, and the word itself is derived from Middle French to break wind which in turn is from Latin of the same meaning.
I knew that, too, I just didn't have any real way to work it into my comment without sounding like I was going off on another tangent. (Addendum: It also says something about the petard's reputation that even Shakespearean-era commoners knew about its dangers and found them funny.)
