Yet another OP-less thread.
I believe it is derived from the practice of pounding sand into a rat hole, but I could be mistaken.
I believe it means to do something futile, such as peeing in the ocean. However, I knew a guy when I was 12 who masturbated by screwing a hole in the ground.
If you’ve ever laid down a brick-and-sand walkway, then you can say, “been there, done that” when somebody tells you to go pound sand.
We had a thread about pounding miscellaneous crystaline solids a while back: Pound sand, dopers Nothing there about rat holes, though.
Sorry about that. An OP was written. It’s out there in cyber-space…
What it said was:
According to Bill Safire’s “On Words” column in tomorrow’s NY Times Magazine, there’s a bit of scatological humor behind the phrase, “He’s too dumb to pound sand in a rat hole.” Safire was too delicate to quote the actual joke, although he knew what it was. He compared it with “Your turn barrel,” which is based on a coarse and not-funny joke, which I’m too delicate to repeat in this post.
So, the question is, What’s the scatological humor behind the derivation of HTDTPSIARH?
Thanks for your help.
From Word Origins:
Ever since I read Truman , I thought “pound sand down a rathole” was too close to “pound salt up your asshole” to be taken literally. Joe Klein, then of Newsweek , did anyway, of course. “pound salt,” as noted in the earlier thread, is the shorter, more mixed-company-friendly version of that exression.
OK. I give up.
I have read this thread, I have read the previous thread offered by bib and I have read Safire’s column in tomorrow’s NYTimes Mag.
Safire and others have indicated that the phrase originate from the scatalogical usage of pound salt/sand …up your ass.
Would someone please tell me where it is cited that up your ass was connected with the original use of the phrase?
I mean, give me a cite.
If I missed a link, sorry. And Safire seemingly is compounding this.
Like samclem, I have my doubts that there are any hidden meanings here. If a rat has gnawed a hole that leads into your household, you can’t just cover it up with boards or anything else that the rat will simply gnaw through. You could use steel wool, if you have some on hand, but sand is cheaper. You have to pound it into the hole, though, you want it packed tight enough to discourage the rat.
Pounding sand into the rathole is therefore perhaps a necessary chore, but it’s the kind of task you could delegate to your stupid cousin Elmer, because how much intelligence does it take to sit there and pound sand into a rathole?
Pounding sand into a rat hole is a reference to doing something futile and useless, and usually spending a fair amount of energy doing it. I learned about the expression just a while ago myself, and found out that I had some personal experience in that exact area.
At a fish hatchery I worked at on the BC coast, we had a greenhouse type building set on top of the ground(which happened to be sand), and the rats would dig their way under the edge to get in and eat the fish pellets. Every morning we’d come in and find maybe half a dozen spots where the rats had dug under the edge of the building to get in that night, and part of our chores were to go along and kick sand back into the holes and fill them back up to keep the rats out (pounding sand into ratholes).
This was ABSOLUTELY useless, as every morning there would be either new holes, or they’d have just reburrowed through the old ones again, but of course we’d go along the wall and pound more sand in like idiots… :rolleyes: Not much short of cement or sheet metal could stop a rat from burrowing or chewing their way through to get someplace they really wanted.
So I think that someone “too dumb to pound sand into ratholes” would be a person too dumb to do even do a moron-level job… - too dumb to be dumb in essence - not having enough intellegence to even be able to figure out how to do something that regular people have already evolved beyond.