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Overwhelm someone with work/‚evidence‘

English Language & Usage Asked by dingalapadum on August 27, 2021

(Remark: after thinking a bit more about it, I arrived at „flooding with information“.)

I‘m looking for a word (maybe an expression or phrase), where one party „B“ hands in so much information/„evidence“ to the other party „A“ that it becomes unfeasible for „A“ to work through the information to verify or falsify a specific claim at hand, and A has to surrender and walk out as ‚loser‘ of the discussion.

Examples:

Law: A requests some files, because he knows that something is wrong. B hands in so many files with irrelevant/redundant information, etc., etc. that for A it becomes practically impossible to find the problem.

Conspiracy: B argues for some kind of strange conspiracy theory and hands in so much sources and hops from one conclusion to the next, that it becomes infeasible for A to pinpoint the mistake(s) within reasonable time. For instance B says: here is the source for some numbers, I‘ve run this script on those numbers, I used the results as request-parameters to some service, which then returned that information, which I run through this other script and here I give you a screenshot of the results. But for A already having to verify the trustworthiness of the first source of the numbers is already difficult and then he would have to run and read all the scripts, etc.. thereby not finding a solid argument for ‚where‘ the mistake is.

2 Answers

I suggest swamp

swamp =

If something swamps a person, system, or place, more of it arrives than can be easily dealt with

Cambridge dictionary

Hence we may say that B swamps A with too much information. This usage is consistent with my own experience.

Answered by Anton on August 27, 2021

Consider inundate

Defined by Collins as :

  1. to overwhelm with a rush or great amount of anything

This is in the sense of flooding as seen in Collins' first definition:

  1. to cover or engulf with a flood; deluge

So in your example:
B inundated A with so many files that it became practically impossible to find the problem.

Answered by Jim on August 27, 2021

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