how to classify? ("I don't want to beat it with a dead horse.")

Dan Goncharoff thegonch at GMAIL.COM
Fri Jun 18 14:56:19 UTC 2010


"Beat it with a stick"?

DanG

On 6/18/2010 10:41 AM, Cohen, Gerald Leonard wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society<ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Cohen, Gerald Leonard"<gcohen at MST.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: how to classify? ("I don't want to beat it with a dead
>                horse.")
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>      In a sort of mental blender, the speaker made a jumble of three phrases, although only two are clear to me: (1) "I don't want to beat a dead horse," and  (2) "I don't want to beat it to death."
>   For the third phrase (to account for "with") a possibility would be something like: "I don't want to deal with this topic anymore."
> But that's just a guess.
>
> Gerald Cohen
>
> ________________________________
>
> Message from James A. Landau,  Fri 6/18/2010 7:15 AM:
>
> Heard in the lab:
>
> "I don't want to beat it with a dead horse"
>
> How do we classify this?
>
> <snip>
>
>       - Jim Landau
>
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
>

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