rat's nest | Idiomator

Meaning: ; (idiomatic)Something that is excessivelycomplicated,entangled, ordisorderly(eitherphysicallyormetaphorically).Synonym:mare's nestrat's nestof a wiring harness1990May 22,Bernard Holland, “Opera: A 17th-Century Rarity, Cesti's 'Dori'”, inNew York Times, retrieved2 March 2017:To make this mid-17th-centuryrat's nestof love affairs and sexual confusions intelligible for late-20th-century audiences is a job in itself.2003November 1, Charles Arthur, “This is the sound of the future”, inIndependent, UK, retrieved2 March 2017:That has been held up by the need to negotiate the distribution rights for each country with the labels and artists—arat's nestof contracts.2015August 26, “Editorial: Why can't college athletes unionize?”, inLos Angeles Times, retrieved2 March 2017:Faced with thatrat's nestof legal and jurisdictional issues, the NLRB threw the Northwestern players' labor rights under the team bus.(idiomatic,computing)Asoftwareorhardwaresystem whose design lacksorganizedstructure, making it difficult to understand and maintain.2002January 14, Jim Turley, “Embedded Processors, Part Two”, inPC Magazine, retrieved2 March 2017:Many CPU silicon designers in the 1990s complained bitterly about therat's nestin the center of SPARC chips.2008July 21, Larry Dignan, “Amazon's S3 outage: Is the cloud too complicated?”, inZDNet, retrieved2 March 2017:And cloud computing relies on millions of connections and services. In other words, it's a troubleshooting nightmare when the cloud goes bust. . . . In other words, the cloud will likely become more of arat's nest.2016July 2, veryatlantic, "Saturday, July 2, 2016: Addendum,"Tales From The Trailer Court™(retrieved 2 March 2017):Think of libraries as the way the sub-idiots who like C code hide all therat's-nestprogramming they don't want you to see.

Examples:

EN: Do you really want to go back to that rat's nest?
ES: ¿Quieres volver a ese estercolero?
EN: Say, listen, Max, the clams of my high-class rat's nest don't like no sober house dick.
ES: Oye, escucha Max... a esos de mi nido de ratas de clase alta.. no les gusta ver a nadie sobrio...
EN: Come on, let's get out of this rat's nest.
ES: Larguémonos.
EN: In this rat's nest?
ES: ¿En este nido de ratas?
EN: Yeah, it's this place, it looks like a rat's nest.
ES: - Sí, este nido de ratas.
EN: You can find the watch in a trade rat's nest.
ES: Pueden encontrar el reloj en un nido de ratas común y corriente.
EN: That's a rat's nest all right.
ES: Eso es un nido de ratas.
EN: All that's left now is this windy rat's nest.
ES: Todo lo que queda ahora son ratas.
EN: Now, a year ago, this here neighborhood was a rat's nest.
ES: Hçace un año este barrio era un nido de ratas.
EN: Any little rat's nest in New York... any little mouse hole, any little rat hole... even on 10th Avenue, I would like better.
ES: El nido de cualquier rata en New York, cualquier agujero de ratón, cualquier agujero de rata, incluso en la avenida 10, lo preferiría.
EN: There's a source over at General Accounting that tells us... there's a whole rat's nest of illegal shit going on over at CREEP.
ES: Un contacto en Ia OGC nos informa... de una red increíble de ilegalidades en el Comité de Reelección.
EN: You're all going to scour every inch of this rat's nest!
ES: ¡Van a fregar cada centímetro de este nido de ratas!
EN: A rat's nest.
ES: Un nido de ratas
EN: No, well-- no, it couldn't have been a rat's nest.
ES: No, no podía ser un nido de ratas
EN: My skin is crawling just being inside your little rat's nest.
ES: Siento escalofríos estando en esta ratonera.

Note: the examples for non latin scripts have a high likelihood of mistakes, we do not own any of this data and it is sourced from Wiktionary, the NLLB database and Opensubtitles. Please help us improve this by contributing correct examples. We will be working to fix this issue over time however it is a bigger issue due to the the difficulties in dealing with non latin scripts and grammatical structures(non-romantic/european languages have lower resources as well ).