When examined, or just because it’s weird on its own.

Example: Beat a dead horse

  1. You whip a horse to go faster
  2. It dies from being whipped too much
  3. You still want the horse to go faster
  4. You continue to whip it
  • egrets@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    Unrelated to hoist as in to lift, despite similarities

    It’s exactly the same word, as I understand it – in this sense, thrown into the air rather than lifted into the air. We’ve started using the past participle as the present tense, and created “hoisted” to fill the gap, and the violent/uncontrolled sense of the word is now archaic.