move the goalposts
/ˈmuːv ðə ˈɡoʊlpoʊst/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 2.59 in modern English
27
Scrabble Score
16
Letters
2
Syllables
11
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- "This is a Government that meets its economic targets and does not move the goalposts."
- "We were given a moving date, and an exchange date, but the buyers kept moving the goalposts and giving us a later date."
- "The tempo at which events are moving, the technological changes and the new developments being encountered on all sides sometimes gives the impression that the objectives or goal posts are constantly being moved."
- "The conflict between being a lady and having a career was crystallized when I was in high school. It seemed as if my mother kept moving the goalposts around."
- "The common thread to these four problems is the question of wha can reasonably be inferred about the covert processes, as opposed to the overt acts, of other organisms if we and they cannot communicate directly through verbal disclosure. […] No one baulks at applying the same standards of inference to other cultures of our species, but it is still easy to move the goalposts when another species is involved[…]."
- "Sooner or later we have to have rules, and we have to know that they are not going to change, for people to have business plans developed and so that they can go out and raise capital and stick with their business model. But if there is this constant uncertainty that when the Commission changes, or when they have another rule tha they are going to move the goal posts again, nobody is going to want to have anything to do with this field."
Etymology
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈmuːv ðə ˈɡoʊlpoʊst/
- British English: /ˈmuːv ðə ˈɡəʊlpəʊsts/
Inflected Forms
Phrases
Frequently Paired Words
Synonyms
change the goal posts
shift the goalposts