Beating a dead horse
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"Flogging a dead horse" redirects here. For the Sex Pistols album, see Flogging a Dead Horse.
Look up beat a dead horse in Wiktionary, the free dictionary."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