mug's game
English
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Pronunciation
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Noun
mug's game (plural mugs' games)
- (idiomatic) A foolish, profitless, or hopeless undertaking.
- 1956, Anthony Burgess, Time for a Tiger (The Malayan Trilogy), published 1972, page 109:
- ‘It's a mug's game,’ said Crabbe.
- 1988 May 20, Strobe Talbot, "Inside Moves," Time:
- The sheer destructiveness of nuclear weapons makes the quest for defenses a mug's game.
- 2012, David Stevenson, FT Guide to Exchange Traded Funds and Index Funds:
- Although they aspired, like all natural-born gamblers, to taking a flutter and beating that system (they all loved the idea of tips, of course), they were sufficiently cynical to know it's a mug's game and that it was largely bound to fail.
References
- “mug's game”, in Dictionary.com Unabridged, Dictionary.com, LLC, 1995–present.
- "mug's game" at Rhymezone (Datamuse, 2006)
- Oxford English Dictionary, second edition (1989)