I’m looking for the correct phrasing for a term referring to a type of overkill…“Sledgehammer solution to a flyswatter problem,” or something like that.
I want to get the correct phrasing, because it’s going in a legal paper and the attorney will only allow me to use the one metaphor. Any ideas?
In my dialect (London), I think the more common idiom is “using a sledgehammer to crack a nut”. I’ve heard the flyswatter version too, but I’d tend to phrase it as “using a sledgehammer when a flyswatter will do”.
ETA: here’s a video (that’s about 3 minutes too long) of somebody using a sledgehammer to crack nuts. Ah, youtube.
I’m more familiar with using the Sledgehammer to crack a nut metaphor.
It nicely sums up overusing a resource for a problem.
Overkill, conveys the same meaning in one word.
Killing a fly with a sledgehammer is the common answer when googling “overkill metaphor”.
I’ve always heard it as “Killing flies with a shotgun”. It reminds me of an old Popeye cartoon in which he actually destroys his own house while doing just that.
There was one in an old Bloom County strip about “swatting a fly with a Buick.” Always liked that one.
I like “using a bazooka to dispatch a fly”
“A typically American example of a pile-driver solution for a thumbtack problem”
- some guy I heard of