Talk:Flogging a dead horse

To slay the slain
Looking at this edit, it seems this section was removed without much discussion. Thoughts? --evrik (talk) 03:44, 13 October 2019 (UTC)

A comparable expression for useless labour is "thrice to slay the slain", a quotation from John Dryden, in Alexander's Feast, stanza iv. Dryden drew his inspiration from Sophocles's 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?" The trope was used in Latin, too: in Libanius's 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." The expression was used in "literary" contexts, as when Edward Young mused:

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

In the heated atmosphere of literary journalism, the phrase was often quoted to show the writer's knowledge. In Punch for May 1861, a broad satire on the heated controversies caused by the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, which was defended by Thomas Henry Huxley, concluded as follows.

"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'!"

- "Monkeyana" from Punch, May 1861


 * It looks like WP:COATRACK to me. To include it, either a more general title for the article is needed, or sources that directly link the material to this particular idiom. SpinningSpark 09:14, 13 October 2019 (UTC)
 * what to do then with To slay the slain? --evrik (talk) 22:21, 14 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Either turn it into an article, which would create a home for the above material, or nominate it for deletion. SpinningSpark 13:59, 15 October 2019 (UTC)
 * With the assertions of Punch, these are simply not demonstrated.
 * Antigone is notable as a primary resource, for being the earliest found so far, relative to the kill the dead spirit of the subject phrase. Going farther than that may require discussion.
 * Do not delete redirects unless they serve absolutely no purpose. Keep them for spelling variations, for main topics, and probably, for other things. Originally, to be able to search without using capitals in the search box, redirects had to be made. Redirects are part of the functionality of the site and provide a route of discovery. Rather than delete this redirect, try to imagine what a reader would put in the search box (i.e. slay the slain, flog dead horse), and add that. When an article is moved, broken redirects are listed by bots, and they are available in the "What links here" tool. So they don't break the site as much as fix it. ~ R.T.G 23:50, 21 October 2019 (UTC)

Sir Humphry Foster
The quote from Foster does not appear to be about hard work at all, so does not support the suggested origin. The whole article is about gambling, and reading the full quote (available here) seems, rather, to have the meaning of wagering on something (a hand at cards) that is almost certain not to win. Foster's good fortune is that his bad bet actually paid off, not that he cheated someone by failing to do the work (when did the aristocracy ever do hard work?). Page 48 also uses the term, also in the gambling context. SpinningSpark 17:38, 11 April 2022 (UTC)

Neither meaning is expressed as "flogging a dead horse". The gambling meaning is "play a dead horse" and the work cheat meaning is "work (for) a dead horse" (according to OED). The quote thus does not belong on this page. SpinningSpark 17:48, 11 April 2022 (UTC)