pound sand

present singular third person pounds sand · participle present pounding sand · participle past pounded sand · past pounded sand

1. idiomaticinformalTo engage in a simple, useless activity that anyone would reasonably know how to perform.

   1 more example

   "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 28, Everett Chamberlain, “My Christmas at Salt Lake”, in The Lakeside Monthly

2. idiomaticinformalTo engage in a futile activity.

   […] 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

   1 more example

   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

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

3. derogatoryidiomaticslangdismissalTo 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.

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

   1 more example

   "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

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