to run [something] into the ground

[George Thompson]

The OED doesn't seem to have this expression.  It's at least 160 years old.

This is from an editorial on the great improvements made in the newspaper business in the last 25 years.

The business of special expressing, of issuing extras or second, third and fourth editions, were no more dreamed of then than the possibility of publishing on the 16th, at New York, a debate in Parliament of the 3rd of any given month.  And we might go on to run the comparison, as they say in the South, "into the ground."  But, to make an end, we may say that nothing can be more unlike, in every respect, than the newspaper press of the present time, and the newspaper press of even a quarter of a century ago.
        New York Morning Express, February 5, 1846, p. 2, col. 2

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org