A way to use beating a dead horse in sentence is.
He's beating a dead horse trying to keep that old car running as it's about to fall apart.
He's beating a dead horse by trying to get his son to potty train at age 15 months as he's clearly not ready.
Beating a dead horse means to keep talking about something or discussing something that no matter what you say will have no good outcome.
When you're beating a dead horse you're wasting your time as nothing good is gonna come out of continuing to talk about the subject or argue about something that you cannot change.
The origin of the expression 'beat a dead horse' comes from the mid-19th century, when the practice of beating horses to make them go faster was often viewed as acceptable.
To beat a dead horse would be pointless, as it wouldn't be able to go anywhere.
Flogging a dead horse is an Anglophone idiom that means that a particular effort is futile, a waste of time without a positive outcome, e.g. such as flogging a dead horse, which will not compel him to useful work.
To beat a dead horse means to bring up a previously settled issue.
Any further discussion on it might be seen as pointless because the issue was already talked about before.
Example: Like I said last week, our trip to Vancouver is on hold until next year, so stop beating a dead horse and asking me about it.
Rumored to be first used and popularized by English politician John Bright in the mid 19th century, the first recorded use of the phrase was in 1859, where a journalist wrote in the London newspaper Watchman and Wesleyan Advertiser: "It was notorious that Mr.