The Origins of the Phrase “Pull Yourself Up By Your Bootstraps”

The phrase “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” originated shortly before the turn of the 20th century. One of the first recorded instances of the concept is in an 1888 physics schoolbook Popular Physics by Joel Dorman Steele that contained the example question “Why can not a man lift himself by pulling up on his bootstraps?” 

Eventually, however, the phrase’s commonly-accepted meaning evolved, and now when we tell people to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps,” it’s implying that socioeconomic advancement is something that everyone should be able to do—albeit something difficult.

This idiom is also the source of the term “booting” a computer or “bootstrapping” which shows up in statistics, web development, programming, quantum physics theory, finance, law, etc.

Also: Boots with bootstraps—or at least the shoe parts commonly called bootstraps, since boots with straps are much older—weren’t popularized until ~1870, so the character Bootstrap Bill in Pirates of the Caribbean, which is set in the late 1700s, is an anachronism. The OED shows that the earliest known reference to any shoe part is in the 1890s, but it meant a boot lace, not the little strap for pulling on your shoe.