The meeting became a Tower of Babel, with everyone talking at once.
Tower of Babel
idiomA grand, over-ambitious project that collapses into confusion and a breakdown in communication.
Origin
The story is told in Genesis 11. In it the whole earth still speaks a single language, and the people settling in Shinar decide to build a city with a tower reaching to the heavens — a monument to their own name, so that they will not be scattered.
God, seeing what a unified and unchecked humanity might attempt, confounds their speech so that no one can understand anyone else. The work halts, the builders scatter across the earth, and the unfinished tower is called Babel — a name the text links by pun to a Hebrew verb meaning to confuse.
In English a Tower of Babel is any ambitious undertaking that dissolves into noise and cross-purposes, especially one wrecked less by the size of the task than by people talking past one another.
Without a shared plan, the international project turned into a Tower of Babel of clashing standards and half-built modules.
What began as a coordinated launch degenerated into a Tower of Babel, each department building to its own specification until the pieces no longer fit together.
Genesis after Eden: Noah and the flood, Babel, Sodom, and the patriarchs.
- 01
two by two (idiom)
In pairs, one alongside another.
- 02
Sodom and Gomorrah (idiom)
A place or scene of extreme wickedness, vice, and moral ruin.
- 03
a pillar of salt (idiom)
The fate of someone who cannot stop looking back at the past instead of moving forward.
- 04
Jacob's ladder (idiom)
A link between the earthly and the heavenly, or by extension a long, steep climb.
- 05
a coat of many colors (idiom)
A conspicuous mark of favouritism that stirs up envy in others.
- 06
old as Methuselah (idiom)
Extremely old; ancient.