pound sand
verbEtymology Of 19th-century origin. Used as an example both of an activity so simple that almost anyone could do it and of an activity so pointless that only a fool would do it.
1
Idiomatic, Informal To engage in a simple, useless activity that anyone would reasonably know how to perform.
- "Bishop McKillup lives there. He's got only three wives, and they three all put together don’t know enough to pound sand with a mallet, with a receipt on the handle." For which striking symbol of imbecility I should have given Jake a good deal of credit, if I had not heard him using it several times before as a regular stock expression1871 January 23, Everett Chamberlain, “My Christmas at Salt Lake”, in The Lakeside Monthly:
- […] Without men on the ground, we'll be pounding sand."2010, Eric Blehm, The Only Thing Worth Dying For: How Eleven Green Berets Forged a New Afghanistan, HarperCollins, published 2010, →ISBN, page 44:
- He told Shelton we needed to "unleash holy hell." “We're not just going to pound sand,” he added.2011, Donald Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown: A Memoir:
3
Derogatory, Idiomatic, Slang To go away; get lost; go to hell; to waste one's own time (with some other meaningless task) rather than waste the speaker's time with something equally irritating or pointless.
- All you do is complain. Why don't you go pound sand up your ass and stop bothering the line staff.
- "The price to us was going to be $3 million, and we had four months to pay before the Licensing 6.0 deadline. We told Microsoft to go pound sand."2003 March 15, Christopher Koch, “Showdown at the 6.0 Corral”, in CIO:
- Related terms
- enough sense to pound sand into a rathole