💼 “back to the drawing board”

What it means: To start again from nothing after a failure.

“The prototype sank, so it was back to the drawing board.”

Where it comes from

From a Peter Arno cartoon in The New Yorker (1941): an engineer surveying a crashed machine’s remains and saying the line. The board has since gone digital; the phrase stayed.

← be in the red · all work & money idioms · burn the midnight oil →

the bottom linebe in the redburn the midnight oilpay through the nosego the extra mile

More phrases, including proverbs from dozens of languages, at Proverbs of the World.