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Reader question: Please explain “going back to the drawing board” in this sentence: “The Department of Education and four nonprofit partners are going back to the drawing board in search of ways to keep rural children from going hungry.” My comments: The old plans no longer work. Hence, the Department of Education and their nonprofit partners are going to come up with new schemes to keep rural children from going hungry. That’s what “going back to the drawing board” is about, literally meaning they’ll have to draw up something new on their drawing board or table as if they were architects or painters. In our example, we can infer that the old plans are failing, perhaps due to bureaucracy (meetings and delays due to complicated procedural work) or corruption (schools and officials may spend the money on something else instead of paying for, say, a free lunch for pupils). Therefore, the Department of Education have to abandon the old plans and create new mechanisms along with the help of its four nonprofit partners, who are in this not for money making, but because they feel it’s the right thing to do. Anyways, according to KnowYourPhrase.com, the expression “going back to the drawing board” is American in origin: It’s believed that the origins for this phrase come from an American artist named Peter Arno, who wrote a cartoon for the New Yorker in 1941. The cartoon consists of a crashed plane in the background, and there’s a man dressed in a fancy suit walking away from the crash site, saying: | 
