Wiktionary
n. (context chiefly US English) A difficult, abstract problem that worsens as one attempts to handle it.
Wikipedia
Tar Baby is a fictional character, a mutant in the Marvel Comics Universe.
Tar Baby is a novel by the American author, Toni Morrison, first published in 1981.
Tar Baby is a doll made of tar from the second of the Uncle Remus stories.
Tar Baby may also refer to:
- Tar Baby (novel), a novel by Toni Morrison
- Tar Baby (comics), a Marvel Comics character
- "Tar Baby", a song on the album Promise by English Singer Sade
Usage examples of "tar baby".
And all the time he had been getting more entangled with John Shooter's tar baby.
The instant they realized the alarm was not a shared hallucination they stopped doing what they were doing (or more precisely, stopped paying attention to the fact that they were doing it), queried the Tar Baby, downloaded a detailed report of the situation, and studied it, fully prepared to leap out of bed and hit the ground running if the emergency seemed to warrant it.
I've got the Tar Baby in my sights and it's swarming with bandits.
Mort had smacked the tar baby in the head with his left hand and it had stuck fast.
Whenever we have been furnished with a tar baby ostensibly stuffed with jewels, and warned that it will be dishonorable and irreverent to disembowel it and test the jewels, we keep our sacrilegious hands off it.