back to the drawing board
- 1Said when a plan has failed and you need to start again with a new idea.
Like erasing a drawing and starting a fresh one because the first did not look right.
When the bridge design failed the safety test, the team went back to the drawing board.
The cake fell flat in the oven, so it's back to the drawing board for my recipe.
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Origin
This phrase comes from a 1941 New Yorker cartoon by Peter Arno. It showed an engineer walking away from a crashed plane, with the caption "Well, back to the old drawing board."