whack-a-mole
nounEtymology
From whack + a + mole (“a small, burrowing, insect-eating mammal of the family Talpidae”), from the arcade game Whac-A-Mole which involves quickly and repeatedly hitting the heads of mechanical moles with a mallet as they pop up from holes. The name of the arcade game was coined in 1977 when it was first sold in the United States; the original game released in Japan in 1975 was called モグラ退治 (Mogura Taiji, literally “Mole Extermination”).
Definitions
A situation where problems or tasks keep reappearing repeatedly.
- 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.
A strategy of addressing recurrent, unpredictable problems in a piecemeal, temporary way…
A strategy of addressing recurrent, unpredictable problems in a piecemeal, temporary way at their point of emergence.
The neighborhood
Vish — recursive loop
No curated loop yet for whack-a-mole. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.
sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA