back to the drawing board
back to the drawing board
Meaning
- back to the planning stage
- start again on a new design or plan after the failure of an earlier attempt
- back to the beginning because the current attempt was unsuccessful
Examples Sentences
- My experiment was a failure, so I’m back to the drawing board.
- Sometimes the best way to proceed after a mistake is to start over and go back to the drawing board.
- I think we should go back to the drawing board with our design, and try to make it better this time.
- If our proposal is not accepted, we’ll go back to the drawing board.
- Well, it’s back to the drawing board for John – his proposal was rejected by the boss again.
- The client rejected all our proposals, so we had to ask the consultant to take the project back to the drawing board.
Origin:
Drawing board This term has been used since World War II as a jocular acceptance that a design has failed and that a new one is needed. It gained common currency quite quickly and began appearing in US newspapers by 1947, as here in the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin, Washington in December 1947:
“Grid injuries for the season now closing suggest anew that nature get back to the drawing board, as the human knee is not only nothing to look at but also a piece of bum engineering.”
It was well-enough known by 1966 for it to be used as a title for an episode in the ‘Get Smart’ TV series, and has also been used as the title of several books.
A drawing board is, of course, an architect’s or draughtsman’s table, used for the preparation of designs or blueprints.
The phrase originated as the caption to a cartoon produced by Peter Arno (Curtis Arnoux Peters, Jr.), for the New Yorker magazine, in 1941. The cartoon shows various military men and ground crew racing toward a crashed plane, and a designer, with a roll of plans under his arm, walking away saying, “Well, back to the old drawing board”.
Share your opinions