whack-a-mole

Language: en

Meaning: (idiomatic,chieflyCanada,US)Thepracticeoftryingtostopproblems, etc., thatrepeatedlyoccurin anapparentlyrandommanner; also, theactofdealing withsuchmattersin apiecemealmanner withoutachievingacompletesolution.Trying to get rid of spam e-mails is likewhack-a-mole: as soon as you delete one, another appears.2007November,Gil Schwartz, “The Office Politic: Escape from the Job Monster”, inDavid Zinczenko, editor,Men’s Health, volume22, number 9, Emmaus, Pa.:Rodale,→ISSN,→OCLC,page122, column 1: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 ofwhack-a-mole. Trust me, you'll never run out of quarters.2014November 17,Roger Cohen, “The horror! The horror! The trauma of ISIS[print version:International New York Times, 18 November 2014, page 9]”, inThe New York Times‎[1], New York, N.Y.:The New York Times Company,→ISSN,→OCLC, archived fromthe originalon10 June 2021:What is unbearable, in fact, is the feeling, 13 years after 9/11, that America has been chasing its tail; that, in somewhack-a-molehorror 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.2020August 29, Rebecca Nicholson, “Tom Cruise: Another groundbreaking role for cinema’s cheerleader”, inKatharine Viner, editor,The Guardian‎[2], London:Guardian News & Media,→ISSN,→OCLC, archived fromthe originalon16 October 2021: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 corridorwhack-a-mole.2021March 17, Drachinifel, 13:14 from the start, inGuadalcanal Campaign - The Big Night Battle: Night 2 (IJN 3(?) : 3 USN)‎[3], archived fromthe originalon14 July 2022: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 playingwhack-a-mole, tied one of the more important breakers down so that it physicallycouldn'ttrip. 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 withWashington,South Dakotasimply held course whilst men in the switchboard room tried their best to reset the ship's entire electrical grid.

Examples:

EN: Let me at that whack-a-mole.
ES: Dejame en ese whack-a-mole.
EN: - It's a big game of whack-a-mole.
ES: - Todo un juego de...
EN: They can only pop up in the areas we choose, like that old earth game of whack-a-mole.
ES: Que sólo puedan aparecer en las áreas que elegimos, como el juego de la vieja tierra de golpe a ciegas.
EN: I'm here because Sarah Connor is a deluded, dangerous whack-a-mole who killed a man because she believes he'll invent a computer system that declares war on the world.
ES: Estoy aquí porque Sarah Connor es una blanda, peligrosa, de tipo Whack-A-Mole que mató a un hombre porque creía que en el futuro, inventaría un sistema computarizado que declarará la guerra al mundo.
EN: She was probably just a nut job, some kind of whack-a-mole.
ES: Seguramente era una loca.
EN: - Oh, whack-a-mole.
ES: -Oh, el caza-topos(NdT:
EN: John-John played whack-a-mole with a senior citizen.
ES: John-John hizo guacamole con un jubilado.
EN: We're playing whack-a-mole.
ES: Esto es un no parar.
EN: You're like a human whack-a-mole.
ES: Eres como un Aplasta-Al-Topo humano.
EN: How's whack-a-mole?
ES: ¿Encontraste al espía?
EN: Well, we liken early sobriety to a whack-a-mole game.
ES: Comparamos un desenganche prematuro con el juego de golpear los topos.
EN: It's just like playing whack-a-mole.
ES: Es igual que jugar al Golpea al Topo.
EN: I want to play whack-a-mole.
ES: - ¿Por favor?
EN: We've been playing whack-a-mole with these guys since Ward first picked me out of my van.
ES: Hemos estado luchando contra estos tipos desde que Ward me sacó de mi furgoneta.
EN: Trying to get an answer out of you about your past is like playing whack-a-mole.
ES: Tratar de obtener una respuesta de ti acerca de tu pasado es como jugar a golpear al topo.

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 ).

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