mug's game

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English

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Etymology

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Pronunciation

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Noun

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mug's game (plural mugs' games)

  1. (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”, in 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.

Translations

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References

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