Meaning
To damage your own cause, position, or prospects through your own words or actions - a self-inflicted blunder that helps your rivals or opponents. It implies avoidable clumsiness rather than bad luck, and is used especially of public relations, political, and career mistakes. Informal; exasperated or mocking in tone, and a favourite of political and sports commentary. Regional use: American English origin; now General English.
Origin
American in origin and younger than its literal ingredients. Literal reports of men accidentally shooting themselves in the foot appear in US newspapers from the early 1850s (Word Histories cites the Buffalo Commercial Advertiser of 1852 and the New Orleans Daily Picayune of 1853), and a distinct literal sense - soldiers deliberately wounding a foot to escape the front line - is well attested from the First World War onward; World Wide Words cites a 1933 Sherwood Anderson story and 1969 military testimony. The figurative sense is mid-20th-century: Word Histories traces it to an August 1951 Associated Press interview with Admiral W. M. Fechteler, while the OED's first figurative quotation, as reported by Michael Quinion, is William Howells' Mankind in the Making (1959), with the expression becoming common from the early 1980s. Quinion argues the figurative blunder draws on careless gun-handling accidents rather than deliberate self-wounding, so the First World War connection is real but belongs to a literal side sense, not to the modern metaphor.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- foot-shooting
- shoot oneself in the foot
- shoot yourself in both feet
- stop shooting yourself in the foot
Usage Examples
- By mocking the jury's questions, the defence lawyer shot himself in the foot.
- The party keeps shooting itself in the foot with contradictory announcements.
- Criticising your own product in public is a quick way to shoot yourself in the foot.