Welcome to a new year! It’s a good time to “start from scratch,” this week’s idiom meaning to start over or start again from the beginning.

For example, “My essay was not working well, so I deleted it and started from scratch.”

According to TheFreeDictionary.com, the origin of this idiom is the following: “The scratch line was a stripe across the ground where a race began. Starting from scratch meant having no advantage against others in the race where handicaps allowed some entrants shorter distances to run.”

We wish you all a wonderful 2017!