spin one's wheels

Grammar usage guide and real-world examples

Is it any surprise that, given the topsy-turvy world in which we now live, spinning one's wheels — formerly the very definition of a fruitless, frustrating activity that is best avoided — has been recast as a diverting recreation, and embraced by a mass audience?

For cynical people, prayer can't create changed outcome in these complicated countries; prayer is simply spinning one's wheels.

Things like knowing how to judge the severity of a call based on the sound of urgency in an operator's voice, or not staying at dead-end scenes for too long to avoid spinning one's wheels, are just a few of the things he picked up from working around the pros.

For three dollars, the uninitiated can spin Duff's Wheel of Misfortune.

"But I wouldn't be spinning everyone's wheels, including my own, if I didn't believe it makes a certain kind of sense".

From Albert Renger-Patzsch, known for austere images of industrial architecture taken between the wars, comes an image of a pair of hands shaping clay on a spinning potter's wheel.

Butturini tells her story through the lens of food — its restorative powers and its capacity to trigger the brain to remember and hope in times of tragedy and challenge: "And like a potter centering clay on a spinning potter's wheel, the mere act of cooking centered me," Butturini writes in "Keeping the Feast," her blunt and brave memoir.

Still another might appear to be without a normal drive to eat or avoids "standard symbolic play" with toys, instead lining up all the dolls head to toe or spinning a truck's wheels for long periods.

But unlike my annoying wheel spinning, Lavender-Smith's wheels have spangly rims.

Modern civilizations spin the potter's wheel of monotheism to manufacture the greatest cause of all, humanity.

At the pledging meeting for Gavi, the global vaccines alliance, hosted by German chancellor Angela Merkel, MSF organised a stunt featuring supporters dressed as Merkel, David Cameron, Barack Obama and others spinning "Pharma's wheel of fortune", claiming that whichever way the wheel was spun, the drug companies always won.