quagmire
noun

- soft miry land that shakes or yields under the foot; a difficult, precarious, or entrapping position.

- a soft wet area of land that gives way under the feet; an awkward, complex, or embarrassing situation from which extrication is very difficult.

- an area of soft, wet ground that you sink into if you try to walk on it; a difficult situation that is hard to escape from.

Merriam-Webster, Collins English Dictionary, Cambridge Dictionary

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WORD ORIGIN

Quagmire is a compound of two words that — rather satisfyingly — both mean more or less the same thing.

Quag evolved from the Middle English quabbe (a marsh, boggy ground), which traces back to an Old English root cwabba, meaning to shake or tremble — evoking the unnerving sensation of ground that wobbles underfoot as if it's alive. An alternative ancestor is quakemire, where the first element is literally the verb to quake. Either way, the shaking is the point.

Mire arrived separately, via Old Norse mýrr (bog, swamp) and Old Icelandic mýrr, both from a Proto-Germanic root related to moss and damp ground. It entered Middle English in the 1200s, already carrying connotations of entanglement and being stuck fast.

The compound quagmire appears in written English from around 1566. By 1766, the figurative sense — a situation one cannot easily escape — was in use. Then the word largely faded from common currency until 1965, when American journalist David Halberstam published "The Making of a Quagmire", his account of the US involvement in Vietnam. That book — and that war — embedded the word permanently in the political lexicon. It has rarely been out of the headlines since.

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TRAPPED IN TIME

The La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles are where crude oil has seeped up from the ground for tens of thousands of years.

As the lighter elements evaporate, a thick, sticky tar (asphalt) is left behind. The tar pits are famous for the remarkable Ice Age fossils preserved within them. Over millennia, animals became trapped in the sticky tar and were slowly preserved. Scientists have excavated millions of bones from the site, including: mammoths and mastodons, aber-toothed cats, wolves, giant ground sloths, and ancient horses and camels.

The site is also home to the La Brea Tar Pits Museum (formerly the Page Museum), where you can see fossils on display and watch ongoing excavation work. It's one of the world's most productive Ice Age fossil sites and a registered National Natural Landmark. The pits are still active today — you can see bubbles of methane gas rising through the asphalt.

A must-see if you’re ever in L.A. :-)

Helga & Paul Smith

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SYNONYMS

bind, bottomless pit, box, bureaucratic maze, can of worms, catch-22, corner, deadlock, deep trouble, deep-water situation, dilemma, dire straits, disarray, entanglement, fix, gridlock, hard place, hole, hornets' nest, hot water, impasse, impossible situation, in a (pretty) pickle, inextricable mess, jam, knotty problem, labyrinth, legal labyrinth, lose-lose situation, losing battle, mare's nest, maze, minefield, morass of bureaucracy, no-win situation, over a barrel, plight, predicament, QUAGMIRE, quandary, rabbit hole, rat's nest, rut, snare, spot, stalemate, sticky situation (wicket), stymied, tangle, tar pit, tight corner (spot), treacherous ground, unwinnable game, uphill battle, vicious circle

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SMUGGLE OWAD into a conversation today, say something like:

"Global politics feel like a right QUAGMIRE at the moment."

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Paul
(OWAD Founder)