beat a dead horse
(Redirected from beating a dead horse)
English[edit]
Alternative forms[edit]
Pronunciation[edit]
Verb[edit]
beat a dead horse (third-person singular simple present beats a dead horse, present participle beating a dead horse, simple past beat a dead horse, past participle beaten a dead horse or (colloquial) beat a dead horse)
- (idiomatic) To persist or continue far beyond any purpose, interest or reason.
- After having shown us three hours of instructional and safety videos, the inspector was simply beating a dead horse by telling us to buckle up as we got into the van.
- 1992, William A. Katz, Reference Services and Reference Processes, McGraw-Hill, →ISBN, page 220:
- The library director believes the argument about “professionalism” is a “dead horse we should stop beating.”
- 1999, Fredrick Carl Redlich, Hitler: Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet, Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page xii:
- A friend, the political scientist Irving Bernstein, told me that political scientists and historians are inclined to regard the question of objectivity as a dead horse that one should stop beating, and maintained that it is not the scholar but the lay person who has problems with objectivity.
Translations[edit]
continue far beyond reason — see flog a dead horse