Etymology: beating a dead horse

I spend a bit of time on a website entirely devoted to Michigan football, which is awesome. It provides me hours of distraction and relief. However, the main thing that it provides for me is funny picture. Anyhow, sports websites and more specifically arguments are pretty much carried on with as much civility as debates on whether we should be a giant socialist country or not are in Congress. Anyhow, at some point during the discussion on Mgoblog somebody tends to bust out this picture of a guy beating a dead horse vociferously. Or, vociferously beating a dead horse. Pick your poison. Either way, it's amazing.

But we should probably get down to tackling the word root origin instead of just chuckling over this jaunty fellow wailing away on what might actually be a camel. Wikipedia describes the idiom, a bit toolishly as flogging a dead horse and claims that it is sometimes used in the bits of the Anglophone, you just know some Brit wrote this, world. Wrong, Wikipedia. Everyone says beating a dead horse, even Brits, and if they don't like it they can talk to George Washington.Oh, snap. Below is a graph of how I used the term correctly.

Brief aside to admire cute babies laughing.




Okay, enough enacting the labyrinth of the post-modern mind. The OED credits it to the globe in 1972, while Wikipedia, who do you trust?, credits it to famed orator, a term I use infrequently, John Bright. Apparently he used it in reference to Parliament feeling apathetic about more democratic representation. An idea I can get similarly apathetic about because enlightened despotism is the way to go.

Wikipedia also offers this little nugget, which gives me a second chance to plug Antigone on this very blog when the great orator Tiresias says, "Nay, allow the claim of the dead; stab not the fallen; what prowess is it to slay the slain anew."

Things I've learned about parenting.

She seems to sleep better when we turn the monitor off. I haven't figured out if it's causal or just dumb luck.

Babies, by and large, enjoy crying.

Toys are frustrating rather than fascinating when you don't have gross motor skills.

Zoos are not the as amazing for infants as they could be.

Infants, for the most part, don't enjoy Harper's. Start with board books. Then go crazy reciting them.

Babies don't mind drool.

Adults do.

Of late I end with writing that is not my own:

“But sitting here beside this girl as unknown to him now as outer space, waiting for whatever she might say to unfreeze him, now he felt like he could see the edge or outline of what a real vision of Hell might be. It was of two great and terrible armies within himself, opposed and facing each other, silent. There would be battle but no victor. Or never a battle — the armies would stay like that, motionless, looking across at each other, and seeing therein something so different and alien from themselves that they could not understand, could not hear each other’s speech as even words or read anything from what their face looked like, frozen like that, opposed and uncomprehending, for all human time. Two-hearted, a hypocrite to yourself either way.”