hairball vs quagmire

hairball

noun
  • A messy, tangled, intractable issue. 

  • A small wad of fur or mass of hair formed in the digestive system of a cat or other animal, from hair ingested while grooming. 

quagmire

noun
  • A perilous, mixed up and troubled situation; a hopeless tangle. 

  • A swampy, soggy area of ground. 

verb
  • To embroil (a person, etc.) in complexity or difficulty. 

How often have the words hairball and quagmire occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )