Quirky Etymology: Deadline
by Take a look at the possible origin of a freelancer’s worst enemy, and how it has evolved to its current meaning.
While writing an article on procrastination that you may or may not have read, I was confronted by a term I haven’t used in quite some time: “Deadline” the context of the word was referring to the fact that procrastinators often only begin to truly apply themselves just before the deadline of a major project, but the word stuck in my mind. Deadline. It’s certainly a threatening term. I decided to do a little research and see what I could unearth about the origins of the word.
My first venture lead me to etymology.com, which I would think to be a logical starting point. The website informed me of a possible origin to the phrase heralding all the way back to the Civil War. A dead line, or dead man’s line, was a line marked in boards nailed to stakes and posts in prisons which represented a line which prisoners of war were not allowed to cross. If they made the attempt, prison guards were to shoot any prisoners “who might touch, fall upon, pass over or under [or] across the said ‘dead line’”.
Another possible explanation alluded to is a guideline marked on the printing plate of a printing press meant for newspapers. All content within this line was printed, and anything outside of it was not. It was essentially the border between a live story and a dead one, as it were.
The former definition seems to be referenced in several separate sources, which leads me to wonder: How did a word originally meaning a literal line of death come to describe the cutoff date for assignments and projects? I tried to follow the logical progression of the term. See if you can identify with my train of thought.
It seems to me that the dead line serves as a boundary between the realm of the living and that of the dead. Anything before the line is kept alive, while anything after it is swiftly given the axe. It stands to reason, then, that the same could be applied to the modern definition. Any project or paper turned in before the paper’s deadline is accepted and graded, hopefully not too harshly. Anything after the deadline is usually not accepted, or if it is, with reduction in points or pay. This is akin to a man making it past a dead line in a prison with a bullet in the arm or leg to show for his troubles: injured, but still alive. Perhaps the terms have more in common than the first glance would suggest.
If you have any words or phrases you would like me to investigate, let me know in the comments box below. Suggestions for the next installment of Quirky Etymology are always welcome.
Sources: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=deadline
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/deadline
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