Idiom
whip the cat
Meaning
To attempt to get work or money from someone who is too weak or poor to provide it.
Meaning adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Examples
“It is useless to whip the cat when the company has no money.”
“The manager keeps demanding more sales from the struggling team, but he is just whipping the cat.”
“By pressuring the impoverished villagers for further taxes, the local official was merely whipping the cat, as they had nothing left to give.”
Examples
simple
“It is useless to whip the cat when the company has no money.”
contextual
“The manager keeps demanding more sales from the struggling team, but he is just whipping the cat.”
complex
“By pressuring the impoverished villagers for further taxes, the local official was merely whipping the cat, as they had nothing left to give.”
Origin
The term emerges from a documented prank played at the expense of the gullible. In this diversion, a countryman was invited to display his physical strength by whipping a cat that had been harnessed to a load far exceeding its capacity. The amusement lay in the obvious futility of the task; a cat, regardless of the severity of the lash, is not a beast of burden.
The practice is said to have informed the early sense of attempting to extract more from a source than it can possibly provide. This association with insufficiency migrated into the sphere of personal finance, where it came to denote extreme parsimony. The transition from a cruel rural joke to a description of a man who would skin a flint was completed by the linguistic connection to poverty and general uselessness.
Key words
Related idioms
- Updated