muddy the waters

1. Confuse the issue, as in Bringing up one irrelevant fact after another, he succeeded in muddying the waters. This metaphoric expression, alluding to making a pond or stream turbid by stirring up mud from the bottom, was first recorded in 1837.

Example Sentences

A trial this week is likely to further muddy the waters for troops remaining in Los Angeles, as well as any deployed in D.C. to fight crime there.

From Los Angeles Times

To muddy the waters further, another of Mark McDonald's panel of experts has said that in fact there was post-mortem evidence of air embolism in the babies.

From BBC

“When ChatGPT started being a thing, everybody was accusing everybody of being a bot. If you wanted to say somebody was a bad bot, you’d call them Grok. The worst thing that does is just muddy the waters and make everybody distrust each other.”

From Slate

Asked if Africa had a good case to provide the next Pope based on the Church's growth on the continent, he said he felt the Pope shouldn't be chosen based on statistics, because "those types of considerations tend to muddy the waters".

From BBC

A person's actions, however, can often have some plausible ambiguity that bad faith actors can exploit to muddy the waters.

From Salon

Related Words

• belie 
• blind 
• block out 
• blur 
• camouflage 
• cloud 
• confuse 
• cover 
• darken 
• dim 
• disguise 
• eclipse 
• mask 
• misrepresent 
• muddy 
• overshadow 
• shroud 
• veil