throwing an ant into a sty
- idiom
- Archaic
:
un gesto inútil
- Trying to change the company's culture alone felt like throwing an ant into a sty.
Examples
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Fixing that one error in the broken codebase was like throwing an ant into a sty.
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Donating one dollar to such a massive campaign is just throwing an ant into a sty.
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It's pointless; you're just throwing an ant into a sty.
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Why bother? It's like throwing an ant into a sty.
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Donating one dollar to such a massive campaign is just throwing an ant into a sty.
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Trying to change the company's culture alone felt like throwing an ant into a sty.
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Fixing that one error in the broken codebase was like throwing an ant into a sty.
Synonyms
1
9.9
Spending time or effort on something that will not work
Very unimportant and not worth worrying about
Antonyms
How Effective
Surface Forms
Morphology
throw + an + ant + into + a + sty
The meaning 'a futile or negligible action' follows directly from the literal image: throwing a tiny ant into a large pigsty would have no noticeable effect, so the overall sense is compositional. This size/impact contrast is an immediately inferable metaphor and is cross-linguistically familiar, so a B1 learner who knows the component words can predict the idiomatic sense.
Etymology
Throwing an ant into a sty paints a clear picture: imagine tossing a tiny ant into a messy pig sty, where the ant is lost and makes no difference. That's why the phrase means 'an action that has little or no effect'.