to sink into quicksand
- idiom
- Informal
:
hundir en arenas movedizas
- He realized too late that he had sunk into quicksand with mounting debts and no escape in sight.
Examples
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When the negotiations stalled, the team began to sink into quicksand of bureaucracy and confusion.
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If we keep avoiding the main issue, we'll just sink into quicksand and make things worse.
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Don't sink into quicksand when faced with challenges!
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Why do you always sink into quicksand when things get tough?
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He realized too late that he had sunk into quicksand with mounting debts and no escape in sight.
-
If we keep avoiding the main issue, we'll just sink into quicksand and make things worse.
-
When the negotiations stalled, the team began to sink into quicksand of bureaucracy and confusion.
Synonyms
29
7.6
To become stuck in mud or a difficult situation
1
4.1
Become tricked into a bad or dangerous situation
1
9.9
To stay sad and think about problems instead of trying to fix them
Antonyms
How Trapped
- Informal
∞
1.0
- Informal
8
4.2
200
2.6
Surface Forms
Morphology
The metaphorical meaning is directly related to the literal image: to "sink into quicksand" evokes being caught and unable to escape, so a learner who knows 'sink', 'into' and 'quicksand' can plausibly infer the idea of becoming trapped in a worsening situation. However, this is a metaphorical extension rather than a strictly compositional, literal sense, so understanding requires mapping from a physical scenario to an abstract situation.
Etymology
The idiom sink into quicksand comes from the picture of someone stepping into quicksand and slowly going down: the more they struggle, the more they sink and it becomes harder to get out. So, the phrase means 'to become stuck in a situation that gets worse and is hard to escape'.