sand

sand

1. dated slang Courage, determination, or resolve; grit. You've got to have sand if you want to work as a hand on this ranch. We don't want someone who's going to quit when the going gets tough. She's got more sand than anyone I know. Once she sets her mind to something, she doesn't stop until she's got it.
2. dated slang Sugar. A: "I'll have a cup of Joe with cow and sand!" B: "Excuse me?" B: "Sorry, one coffee with milk and sugar, please."
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

sand

n. sugar. Do you use sand in your coffee?
McGraw-Hill's Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions
See:
  • a line in the sand
  • a rope of sand
  • be built on sand
  • bring sand to the beach
  • build (something) on sand
  • build on sand
  • built on sand
  • bury (one's) head in the sand
  • bury head in the sand
  • bury your head in the sand
  • bury/hide one's head in the sand, to
  • bury/hide your head in the sand
  • draw a line in the sand
  • footprints on the sands of time are not made by sitting down
  • get (one's) head out of the sand
  • go pound sand
  • have (one's) head in the sand
  • have enough sense to pound sand
  • hide (one's) head in the sand
  • hide one's head in the sand
  • line in the sand
  • lost in the sands of time
  • plough the sand
  • plow the sands
  • pound sand
  • rope of sand
  • run into the sand
  • sand
  • sand down
  • sands are running out
  • sands of time
  • shifting sands
  • the sands are running out
  • the sands of time
  • the shifting sands of (something)
References in classic literature
Having now told the story of Rosanna, I have only to notice one of the many queer ways of this strange girl to get on next to the story of the sands.
The Moonstone
Sail this boat the way you've seen a ship sailed, and you'll be across the sands before you know it."
The Road to Oz
The cold evening breeze, of which I have spoken, whistled through every chink of the rude building and sprinkled the floor with a continual rain of fine sand. There was sand in our eyes, sand in our teeth, sand in our suppers, sand dancing in the spring at the bottom of the kettle, for all the world like porridge beginning to boil.
Before supper was eaten we buried old Tom in the sand and stood round him for a while bare-headed in the breeze.
Treasure Island
The fifty dollars reward would never be paid for that pitiful mess of splinters on the sand beneath us.
John Barleycorn
I was naturally startled, and lost no time in going out and across the Ottershaw bridge to the sand pits.
War Of The Worlds
Billina showed her the place where she had "stubbed her bill," as she expressed it, and Dorothy dug away the sand until she felt something hard.
"I think it is pure gold, and it must have lain hidden in the sand for a long time.
Ozma of Oz
Not even an echo replied, and his voice died out in the empty vastness of surrounding space, like a pebble cast into a bottomless gulf; then, down he sank, fainting, on the sand, alone, amid the eternal silence of the desert.
Five Weeks in a Balloon
It was a fruitless search, however, in so far as antelope is concerned; but one night as I lay courting sleep at the edge of a little cluster of date-palms that surround an ancient well in the midst of the arid, shifting sands, I suddenly became conscious of a strange sound coming apparently from the earth beneath my head.
Pellucidar
An' until now I always thought it was a lark." He changed his position on the maddening sand and sighed heavily.
The Valley of the Moon
"Yes," said the young man, in an undertone, "I guessed on the sands and now I know; that was why I let him fall soft."
The Wisdom Of Father Brown
The tubes, as I have already remarked, enter the sand nearly in a vertical direction.
The Voyage of the Beagle
"As the sand is being poured into the well-hole, quantities of dynamite can also be thrown in!"
Lair of the White Worm
But the tide was coming in; the water was rising; the gulfs and lakes were filling; the straits were widening: it was time to seek some safer footing; so I walked, skipped, and stumbled back to the smooth, wide sands, and resolved to proceed to a certain bold projection in the cliffs, and then return.
Agnes Grey