from pillar to post

From place to place. We've been going from pillar to post for the past five years. Can't we finally settle down here?

Fig. from one place to a series of other places; (figuratively) from person to person, as with gossip. My father was in the army, and we moved from pillar to post year after year. After I told one person my secret, it went quickly from pillar to post.

From one thing or place to another, hither and thither. For example, After Kevin joined the Air Force, the family kept moving from pillar to post. This expression began life in the early 1400s as from post to pillar, an order no longer used, and is thought to allude to the banging about of a ball in the game of court tennis.

If someone is moved from pillar to post, they are moved repeatedly from one place or position to another. We are exhausted after a weekend of being shoved from pillar to post. I didn't want the children pushed from pillar to post. Note: This expression comes from an early form of tennis that was played indoors. Players often played shots back and forth across the court, from the posts supporting the net to the pillars at the back of the court.

From one place to another; hither and thither.

From one place or thing to another; hither and yon. This expression, which originally (fifteenth century) was from post to pillar, is believed by some to come from the old game of court tennis and to allude to the banging about of balls in a sport that had much looser rules than present-day lawn tennis. Another theory is that the term originally meant from whipping-post to pillory (punishment to hanging), which would better account for the original order. It first appeared in John Lydgate’s The Assembly of Gods (ca. 1420). Dickens (Bleak House, 1853) used both the old and the new versions: “So badgered, and worried, and tortured, by being knocked about from post to pillar, and from pillar to post.”