the.com/backfire
the plan that betrays you the instant you congratulate yourself for it.
means When an action produces the opposite of the intended result, harming the person who set it in motion.
from A literal compound of 'back' and 'fire.' The word burns at both ends of its history: it once named a fire deliberately set to stop a wildfire by burning away the fuel ahead of it — a controlled blaze sent backward into the flames. It also named the unwelcome bang of an engine firing at the wrong moment, exhaust igniting where it shouldn't. From those literal flames the figurative sense caught: a plan that explodes back toward the hand that lit it.
- engine origin
- Fuel ignites in the exhaust, not the cylinder
- loud reputation
- That bang is unburned fuel exploding too late
- forestry use
- Firefighters set backfires to starve wildfires of fuel
- streisand effect
- Hiding something often makes it spread faster
- word age
- Used figuratively since the early 1900s
operation fortitude — wwii deception campaign where german agents sent false intelligence that backfired, leading to operation fortitude's success in misleading hitler about d-day in
operation northwoods — 1962 pentagon false flag proposal to attack us citizens that backfired when leaked, jfk rejected it and it became a major historical example of a plan that coul
hillary clinton email campaign — 2016 campaign strategy to promote trump as 'pied piper' candidate backfired spectacularly when he won the general election