Dictionary

pound sand en · VERB

Pronunciation

• (Australia) audio

Etymology

First use appears c. 1857 in a poem by the Scottish poet Alexander Smith. 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.

Meanings

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 expression 1871 January 14, Everett Chamberlain, “My Christmas at Salt Lake”, in The Lakeside Monthly:
2. (idiomatic, informal) To engage in a futile activity.
   • 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:
   • […] 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:
3. (derogatory, idiomatic, qualifier:dismissal, 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.
   • "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:
   • All you do is complain. Why don't you go pound sand up your ass and stop bothering the line staff.

Forms

Relateds

enough sense to pound sand into a rathole

Synonyms

fuck off · get blood out of a stone · go fly a kite · piss up a rope · pound salt · get lost · pound dirt · kick rocks · take a hike · pound sand into a rathole

wikipedia: Alexander Smith (poet)