Metaphor
The expression "moving the goalpost", which means to make a set of goals more difficult just as they are being met, is often used in business but is derived from American football. It is commonly used to imply bad faith on the part of those setting goals for others to meet, by arbitrarily making additional demands just as the initial ones are about to be met.
In business, the concept is more abstract, with some performance measure or target being set as a goalpost while achieving the target is often known as achieving a goal.
Read more about this topic: Goal (sport)
Famous quotes containing the word metaphor:
“A theology whose god is a metaphor is wasting its time.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The verbal poetical texture of Shakespeare is the greatest the world has known, and is immensely superior to the structure of his plays as plays. With Shakespeare it is the metaphor that is the thing, not the play.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)