Beating a dead horse

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"Beating a dead horse" is an idiom that 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 and Australian English, the phrase is usually expressed as "flogging a dead horse".

The first recorded use of the expression with its modern meaning 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. The Oxford English Dictionary cites the Globe, 1872, as the earliest verifiable use of flogging a dead horse ,

For..twenty minutes..the Premier..might be said to have rehearsed that..lively operation known as flogging a dead horse. ^[1]

1 Earlier meaning
2 "To slay the slain"
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Earlier meaning

There are claims that the phrase originates in 17th century slang, where a "dead horse" was work that was paid for in advance, e.g. "His land 'twas sold to pay his debts; All went that way, for a dead horse, as one would say."^[2] Unfortunately, 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.^{[citation needed]} 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 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.

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".

[edit] "To slay the slain"

A comparable expression for useless labour is "thrice to slay the slain", a quotation from John Dryden, Alexander's Feast, stanza iv. Dryden drew his inspiration from Sophocles' Antigone in which the blind seer Tiresias is led onstage by a boy, and declaims "Nay, allow the claim of the dead; stab not the fallen; what prowess is it to slay the slain anew?"^[3] The trope was familiar in Latin, too: in Libanius' funeral oration for the Emperor Julian he declares of a scoundrel, "Of the three who had enriched themselves through murders, the first had gone over the whole world, accusing people falsely, and owed ten thousand deaths to both Europe and Asia; so that all who knew the fellow were sorry that it was not possible to slay the slain, and to do so thrice over, and yet oftener."^[4] The expression continued in consciously "literary" contexts, as when Edward Young mused:

"While snarlers strive with proud but fruitless pain
To wound immortals, or to slay the slain."

and in the heated atmosphere of literary journalism, it was often quoted, showing the writer's knowledgability. In Punch for May 1861, a broad satire on the heated controversies occasioned by the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, which was defended by Thomas Henry Huxley, concluded

"To twice slay the slain,

      By dint of the Brain,
(Thus Huxley concludes his review)
      Is but labour in vain,
      Unproductive of gain,
And so I shall bid you 'Adieu'!"^[5]