whack-a-mole
/ˈwæk.əˌmoʊl/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.23 in modern English
24
Scrabble Score
10
Letters
5
Syllables
9
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A situation where problems or tasks keep reappearing repeatedly.
Canadian usage; American usage; Countable; Uncountable
noun
A strategy of addressing recurrent, unpredictable problems in a piecemeal, temporary way at their point of emergence.
Canadian usage; American usage; Countable; Uncountable
Example Sentences
- "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."
- ""There's a range of different areas where AI can pose a risk, and we can't have a sort of - as I've previously said - a whack-a-mole approach," Mr Husic said."
Etymology
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”).
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈwæk.əˌmoʊl/
- British English: /ˈwæk.əˌməʊl/
Usage
- Canadian usage
- American usage
- Countable
- Uncountable