Meaning of whack-a-mole | Babel Free

Definitions

1. A situation where problems or tasks keep reappearing repeatedly.
   Canada, US, countable, idiomatic, uncountable
2. A strategy of addressing recurrent, unpredictable problems in a piecemeal, temporary way at their point of emergence.
   Canada, US, countable, idiomatic, uncountable

Equivalents

Examples

“Trying to get rid of spam e-mails is like whack-a-mole: as soon as you delete one, another appears.”

“Identify a challenge. Put your shoulder into it. Make it go away. Just as it disappears, whoops, here comes another one. It's like a game of whack-a-mole. Trust me, you'll never run out of quarters.”

“What is unbearable, in fact, is the feeling, 13 years after 9/11, that America has been chasing its tail; that, in some whack-a-mole horror show, the quashing of a jihadi enclave here only spurs the sprouting of another there; that the ideology of Al Qaeda is still reverberating through a blocked Arab world whose Sunni-Shia balance (insofar as that went) was upended by the American invasion of Iraq.”

“Some flew across the United States; some were planning to fly into London from Europe, though, like many of us, they could only try their best to keep up with the government’s air corridor whack-a-mole.”

“With power being redistributed automatically and surging through other circuits as the system tried to reroute electricity to keep things operational, various parts of the ship began to flicker internally as more and more breakers began to trip and were reset, only to trip again. Then, one of the engineers, tired of playing whack-a-mole, tied one of the more important breakers down so that it physically couldn't trip. This turned out to be a mistake, and a cascade overload crippled the ship's radar, radios, and power training on most of her guns. With no way of communicating with Washington, South Dakota simply held course whilst men in the switchboard room tried their best to reset the ship's entire electrical grid.”

CEFR level