to build on sand
1
7.6
- idiom
- Informal
:
construir sobre arena
- To rely on our strength is to build on sand.
- a house built on sand
So it's sort of like this thing, a house built on sand.
- So it's sort of like this thing, a house built on sand.
Examples
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As John Coleman pointed out, the real raw data for CAGW is built on sand.
Blog text (31) -
His arguments were built on sand, making them easy to refute during the debate.
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The boom of the last 20 years was built on sand.
Blog text (3) -
The second conclusion he drew was that psychoanalysis was a theory built on sand.
Academic text (2009) -
Feminism is the proverbial house built on sand.
Blog text (28) -
When the inevitable storms come—when lenders stop lending, investment slows to a trickle, and the revenue dries up—houses built on sand will crumble.
Blog text (22) -
The project failed because it was built on sand and lacked solid research.
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Developing a marketing strategy without proper data is like building on sand.
How Stable
Surface Forms
Morphology
The figurative meaning is directly inferable from the literal parts: to 'build' something 'on' 'sand' evokes constructing on unstable material, which maps clearly onto basing a plan on an unreliable foundation. This physical-to-abstract mapping is cross-linguistically common and follows a simple compositional image, so a B1 learner who knows the words would likely understand the intended meaning.
Etymology
The idiom build on sand comes from a simple picture: if you build a house on loose sand, the house can sink or fall when the ground moves. So the phrase means to base a plan on a weak, unstable foundation that is 'likely to fail'.