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Possible Duplicate:
Phrase for focusing on unimportant details

I'm trying to find an idiom about tackling smaller problems instead of tackling their root cause. For example,

  • Instead of plugging the holes in the dam, let's try to divert the river (or build a new dam).
  • Instead of hosing down forest fires let's try to stop the kid playing with the matches.
Community
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Asaf
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  • @Jasper Loy: No - the root cause is smoking, which creates and sustains the market for matches (Oh! - and sex, which creates the kids! :) – FumbleFingers Feb 07 '12 at 21:02

3 Answers3

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put a Band-Aid on it (instead of fully treating the injury)

H Stephen Straight
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"Treating the symptoms and not the cause" is a common way to express this. (A Google query for that phrase produces a bunch of examples.)

Monica Cellio
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There are really two conflated issues here: addressing small problems when you should be aggressively tackling the big problem, and fixing messes caused by failing to address a root problem. (Since the effort to clean up a single such mess can exceed the effort it would take to address the root problem, this cannot be considered as “addressing small problems when you should be aggressively tackling the big problem”.)

The first situation is referred to as “pencil-sharpening”. Here’s an example link:

http://www.thepositiveclassroom.org/2011/08/give-me-break-pencil-sharpening.html

The second situation could be called “using an ambulance instead of a fence” -from the poem “The Fence or The Ambulance” by Joseph Malines.

Here is the link to the full text of the poem:

http://www.nypartnersinoralhealth.com/aboutus/poem.html

By the way, the futile worldwide ESL industry is an example of using an ambulance in response to the language barrier, whereas adopting Esperanto as a common second language for everyone would correspond to using a fence.

Hexagon Tiling
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  • Hmm. So far as I can make out, after 125 years the total number of Esperanto speakers in the world is still only a couple of million. My guess is increasing world population probably means that over the last few decades they're actually falling in percentage terms. – FumbleFingers Feb 07 '12 at 22:31
  • FWIW, doesn't the increasing world population also mean that the percentage of NATIVE English speakers is also falling? In any case, one of the potential uses of Esperanto is in helping people acquire those ethnic languages that interest them. Here is a link, for example, to an Esperanto-language document helping you to learn Russian: http://eo.wikibooks.org/wiki/Rusa – Hexagon Tiling Feb 09 '12 at 13:40
  • According to Wikipedia, Science Citation Index reported in 1997 that 95% of its articles were written in English, even though only half of them came from authors in English-speaking countries. I'd expect that trend to continue. Piously hoping for a more democratic/logical choice of global language is like wishing we could ditch the QWERTY keyboard layout (originally designed to slow typists down so the levers wouldn't get jammed up). It just ain't gonna happen. – FumbleFingers Feb 09 '12 at 13:49
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    I ran what you said there through Google Translate, and it came back with, "It'll never fly, Orville!" – Hexagon Tiling Feb 10 '12 at 13:33
  • Here’s a link to the U.S. Esperanto website, where they are smiling (or, raising their eyebrows) over this exchange: http://www.esperanto-usa.org/en/content/%E2%80%9Cit%E2%80%99ll-never-fly-orville%E2%80%9D – Hexagon Tiling Feb 14 '12 at 10:42
  • Haha I see that blogger Mike Jones refers to me as a cretin dissing Esperanto [who] got hoist by his own petards. Presumably he's not a native English speaker - I certainly never heard of petards being used in the plural like that. Having said all that, I'm certainly not wishing to be rude to you, but I can't for the life of me see how I'm losing and you're winning this "argument" (actually, I thought it was just a good-natured discussion, but there you go! :) – FumbleFingers Feb 14 '12 at 14:52
  • Only what you’ve heard before is valid? Or you think I must canonically quote Shakespeare if I am to say such a thing? Maybe I used the plural to refer to your multiple comments. Anyway, most native speakers are unaware of the etymology of any version of the phrase, so your attempt to characterize me as a non-native speaker on that basis is a bit of a stretch (but well in keeping with past form). – Mike Jones Feb 14 '12 at 23:36
  • @mike blown into the air by multiple gate bombs at once??? – ErikE Feb 23 '12 at 18:29
  • @ErikE: Yes, and then he hopped on his horse and rode off in all directions:) – Hexagon Tiling Feb 24 '12 at 21:57
  • BTW, Google Translate now supports Esperanto. Here’s the link at the Esperanto-USA website discussing this: http://www.esperanto-usa.org/en/content/google-translate – So, Esperanto is gaining in recognition. I'd expect this trend to continue:) – Hexagon Tiling Feb 24 '12 at 21:59