Bootstrap analysis - why it is called bootstrap?
The method itself has nothing really to do with boots or straps, just as the jack-knife method also has nothing to do with knives. In the case of bootstrapping, the goal is to determine the accuracy of an estimate from random subsets of a population. Normally estimating something like the variance of the mean requires multiple independent samples, but bootstrapping allows you to perform estimates from a single population. This is essentially allowing the estimate to "pull itself up by its bootstraps", which is the only reasonable source for the term. See also the more general wikipedia article on bootstrapping outside of statistics.