pound sand

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.

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pound sand (third-person singular simple present pounds sand, present participle pounding sand, simple past and past participle pounded sand)

1. (informal, idiomatic) To engage in a simple, useless activity that anyone would reasonably know how to perform.
   • 1871 January, Everett Chamberlain, “My Christmas at Salt Lake”, in The Lakeside Monthly:

     "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

2. (informal, idiomatic) To engage in a futile activity.

   Synonyms: get blood out of a stone, piss up a rope, pound dirt, pound salt, pound sand into a rathole

   • 2010, Eric Blehm, The Only Thing Worth Dying For: How Eleven Green Berets Forged a New Afghanistan, HarperCollins, published 2010, →ISBN, page 44:

     […] Without men on the ground, we'll be pounding sand."

   • 2011, Donald Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown: A Memoir:

     He told Shelton we needed to "unleash holy hell." “We're not just going to pound sand,” he added.

3. (slang, idiomatic, derogatory, dismissal) 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.

   Synonyms: get lost, go fly a kite, take a hike, fuck off

   All you do is complain. Why don't you go pound sand up your ass and stop bothering the line staff.

   • 2003 March 15, Christopher Koch, “Showdown at the 6.0 Corral”, in CIO:

     "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."

• For more quotations using this term, see Citations:pound sand.