This is an IHeart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show, including your stories. Send them to Our American Stories.com. They're some of our favorites. Up next, the story

of intriguing, bizarre, and even curious phrases that we use each and every day in the English

language. Here's Andrew Thompson. Back to square one is an expression that I've always found

interesting. When someone says, you know, we're back to square one in this project,

where you've got to start back at the beginning. It began in the 1930s in Britain,

in soccer matches that were broadcast on the radio. The Radio Times was a famous magazine

there, and they published a famous magazine there,

and they published a numbered grid system,

which divided the soccer field into eight rectangles.

And this allowed commentators to describe to listeners

exactly where the ball was at any time

in reference to this grid system.

Square one was the goalkeeper,

so whenever the ball was passed back to him,

the play was going to resume again and it was referred to as being back to square 1.

Back to the drawing board is similar to back to square one,

although it began in America in 1941 in the New Yorker magazine.

Back to the drawing board obviously means we need to start again.

A drawing board is an architect's or drafters table that they used to prepare designs on.

But in New Yorker magazine in 1941 was during World War II and an artist called Peter Arno drew a picture of military personnel running towards a plane that had just crashed and there's a man

in a suit holding a set of plans under his arm walking away from the crash and the caption reads,

...