Citations:pound sand

Verb: "(idiomatic) to engage in a futile activity"

 * 2004 — Karen Hughes, Ten Minutes from Normal, Thorndike Press (2004), ISBN 9780786267132, page 520:
 * "We want to make sure when we do something, we are not pounding sand …
 * 2007 — Jonathan Rauch, "'This Is Not Charity'", The Atlantic, October 2007:
 * "Without him as anchor and persona," Magaziner says, "we'd be pounding sand."
 * 2010 — Eric Blehm, The Only Thing Worth Dying For: How Eleven Green Berets Forged a New Afghanistan, HarperCollins (2010), ISBN 9780061661228, page 44:
 * Without men on the ground, we'll be pounding sand."
 * 2011 — Young Park, Choices, iUniverse (2011), ISBN 9781462028801, page 235:
 * " Well, Kevin, we may be pounding sand. The proposal is pretty clear cut and they're nit picking about nothing. This morning was a waste of time."

Verb: "(idiomatic, dismissal) to go away; get lost; go to hell"

 * 2003 — Christopher Koch, "Showdown at the 6.0 Corral", CIO, 15 March 2003:
 * "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."
 * 2008 — Andrew Kent, Spam & Eggs: Perception Is Reality, Reality Is Perception, Dog Ear Publishing (2008), ISBN 9781598588644, page 151:
 * "Go pound sand," Johnny repeated in a lighthearted tone. "If you think I'm going to liquidate my detective agency to save the FBI some work, you've got another thing coming."
 * 2009 — Marshall Phelps & David Kline, Burning the Ships: Intellectual Property and the Transformation of Microsoft, John Wiley & Sons (2009), ISBN 9780470432150, page 12:
 * "I sort of cleared my throat and told Efi very firmly that unlike Kodak and Adobe, we didn't have color management. So he could go pound sand as far as I was concerned."
 * 2012 — Kathy Altman, The Other Soldier, Harlequin (2012), ISBN 9780373717903, page 26:
 * And once she'd found out who he was, she hadn't hesitated to tell him to go pound sand.