the.com/wild goose chase
Pursuing something that was never catchable, with the energy of someone who thinks it was.
means A hopeless pursuit of something elusive or nonexistent, usually discovered too late to have been doomed from the start.
from Coined by Shakespeare's era, though not originally about geese at all — a 'wild goose chase' first named a type of erratic horse race where riders had to follow the lead horse's unpredictable path, like geese flying in loose, shifting formation. The chase part came first; the wild-goose logic (futile, scattered, impossible to pin down) got bolted on once people forgot the horse race and just pictured actual geese, which are famously hard to corner.
- origin
- Shakespeare coined it, meant an erratic horse race
- original meaning
- following a leader nobody could match, not geese
- irony
- wild geese fly in disciplined, predictable formation
- modern use
- any search that was doomed before it started