Beating a dead horse

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Beating a dead horse is an idiom which means a particular request or line of conversation is already foreclosed, mooted, or otherwise resolved, and any attempt to continue it is futile. In British English, the phrase is usually rendered as flogging a dead horse

The first recorded use of the expression is by British politician and orator John Bright, referring to the Reform Bill of 1867, which called for more democratic representation in Parliament, and which Parliament was singularly apathetic about. Trying to rouse Parliament from its apathy on the issue, he said in a speech, would be like trying to 'flog a dead horse' to make it pull a load.

There are claims that the phrase originates in 17th century slang, where a "dead horse" was work that was paid for in advance. Flogging, either literally or figuratively, the dead horse was an attempt to coax enthusiasm out of workers who had already been paid and thus were not going to gain any further profit by hard work. This attribution may derive from a statement reportedly made by Admiral William Smythe that "To get a day's work out of a crew during the dead horse month is like flogging a dead horse." Historically, it was common practice to pay a ship's crewmen in advance for their first month's work, which they would usually have spent prior to even boarding the ship on which they were to work. For the first month on board, therefore, they felt as though they were working for nothing, and so they were not terribly motivated. After approximately one month, ships out of the British Isles reached the Horse Latitudes. The problem here is that there is no mention by Smythe of the Horse Latitudes or any explanation of why he supposedly used the phrase "flogging a dead horse".

This attribution confuses "flogging a dead horse" with an entirely different phrase - "to work (for) the dead horse". This phrase was slang for "work charged before it is executed". This use of 'dead horse' to refer to pay that was issued before the work was done was simply an allusion to using one's money to buy a useless thing (metaphorically, " a dead horse"). Most men paid in advance apparently either wasted the money on drink or other such vices or used it to pay debts. The earliest (1638) written example of dead horse says as much: "His land 'twas sold to pay his debts; All went that way, for a dead horse, as one would say." The Smythe quotation is a red herring. He was simply referring to what was already known as the "dead horse month", or the month of no pay, and how difficult it was to get work out of the men during the dead horse month.

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