cliché: back to square one

Meaning: return to the beginning; start again.

Example: If this experiment doesn’t yield the answer, we’ll have to go back to square one.

Origins: Various possibilities: English football broadcasts, board games, or hopscotch.

  (Definitions and origins.)

  (Examples.)

Rewrites:

• revisit square one
• back to “Start”
• back to launch
• time to reboot
• reset to zero

Discussion: I mainly worked with the board game scenario, since that seems to me to be the most apt metaphor.