the.com/drawing board
Where failed plans go to pretend they were never finished, just unstarted.
means The planning stage you return to when a plan has fallen apart and needs to be rethought from scratch.
from Literally the board draftsmen and architects sketched designs on before building anything — drawing here meaning to sketch or render, not to pull. The phrase 'back to the drawing board' took off as a figure of speech in the mid-1900s, often said to have been popularized by a cartoon showing engineers walking away from a crashed plane, blueprint in hand. The image stuck because the board was the place a design lived before it met the real world and sometimes failed there.
- origin
- literal slanted board draftsmen used pre-CAD
- idiom born
- popularized by a 1941 New Yorker cartoon
- myth
- nothing ever actually returns there, it just dies
- function
- a polite synonym for total failure