Indication to start again from the beginning, because one has failed or has reached a dead end. The term probably came from a board game such as snakes and ladders or from a street game such as hopscotch, where an unlucky throw of dice or a marker forces the player to begin the course all over again. It was adopted by British sportscasters in the 1930s, when the printed radio program would include a numbered grid of a soccer (football) field to help listeners follow the game broadcasts. The same sense is conveyed by back to the drawing board, a term originating during World War II, almost certainly from the caption of a cartoon by Peter Arno in the New Yorker magazine, which showed a man holding a set of blueprints and watching an airplane on the ground blow up. A similar phrase with a slightly different sense is back to basics—that is, let’s go back to the beginning, or return to the fundamentals of a subject, problem, or other issue. The term dates from the mid-twentieth century and probably originated in either school or laboratory, where a subject was not clearly understood or an experiment of some kind failed.