willing horse

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willing horse (plural willing horses)

1. (idiomatic, dated) One who readily performs hard work or who voluntarily tolerates an adverse situation.
   • 1863 November 10, “Gen. Sherman's Column”, in New York Times, retrieved 12 February 2014:

     [A]fter a good deal of discussion (some of it angry) among the Major-Generals, it was settled as such things are everywhere—the willing horse (which SHERMAN always is) getting the work to do.

   • 1869, R[ichard] D[oddridge] Blackmore, “FEEDING OF THE PIGS”, in Lorna Doone: A Romance of Exmoor. […], volume II, London: Sampson Low, Son, & Marston, […], →OCLC, pages 57–58:

     [S]he said to me as quietly as a maiden might ask one to carry a glove, "Jan Ridd, carr thic^[sic] thing for me." So I carried it for her, without any words; wondering what she was up to next, and whether she had ever heard of being too hard on the willing horse.

   • 1878, Robert Louis Stevenson, “Down the Oise: To Moy”, in An Inland Voyage, London: C[harles] Kegan Paul & Co., […], →OCLC, page 141:

     Finding us easy in our ways, he […] told me a cock-and-bull story with the moral of another five francs for the narrator. The thing was palpably absurd; but I paid up, and at once dropped all friendliness of manner, and kept him in his place as an inferior with freezing British dignity. He saw in a moment that he had gone too far, and killed a willing horse; his face fell; I am sure he would have refunded if he could only have thought of a decent pretext.

   • 1914, William MacLeod Raine, chapter 10, in A Daughter of the Dons:

     "When he hears of it he'll be more anxious than ever to fight." / Valencia nodded. "A spur to a willing horse."

   • 1999 February 18, Philip D. Delnon, “Education letter: Exhausted, underpaid: and that's a good day”, in The Independent, London, retrieved 12 February 2014:

     There is certainly the need to reward performance and offer incentives for success, but flogging a willing horse is not the way to do it.

• Often used in contexts which suggest that it is unnecessary or unproductive to goad or abuse someone who is a "willing horse".

• “willing horse”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.