down a blind alley
1
8.1
- idiom
- Informal
:
en un callejón sin salida
- After much discussion, they realized their plan was leading them down a blind alley and decided to start over.
- leading us down a blind alley
Examples
-
By making clear that the nationalist agenda has been leading the country down a blind alley, Serbia's loss of sovereignty over Kosovo could well result in the strengthening of Serbian centrists.
Academic text (2005) -
The team went down a blind alley by pursuing strategies that proved to be ineffective and unproductive.
-
Ignoring expert advice took the company down a blind alley, wasting time and resources on a failing project.
Synonyms
7
4.8
Fail to give any useful result or make progress
3
5.5
Fail to make progress even when you try hard
2
7.9
To waste time and effort without making progress
1
9.9
Spending time or effort on something that will not work
Antonyms
How Unproductive
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase evokes the literal image of going 'down' into a 'blind alley' (an alley with no exit), so the idea of pursuing a path that leads nowhere is largely derivable from the constituent meanings. However, the use as a conventionalized metaphor for an unproductive course of action extends beyond the purely spatial sense and may not be fully predictable without exposure, making it only partially transparent to learners.
Etymology
Down a blind alley comes from the image of walking into a narrow alley that is blind because it ends with no exit, so you cannot go further. So, to go down a blind alley means to follow a plan or idea that 'leads nowhere'.