hot potato

1. 1.

   a difficult situation

   “he dropped the topic like a hot potato”

   Broadersituation

Questions about hot potato

What does hot potato mean?

hot potato means "a difficult situation".

Is hot potato a common word?

hot potato is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.