To quote Douglas Adams:
‘I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.’
As a freelance writer, deadlines are a thing that I know a lot about and I also spend a lot of time worrying about. But what I didn’t know is that the word itself has a surprisingly bloody history…
‘Deadline’ as we know it today, i.e. a date or time by which you have to do something, has only been around since the 20th century. But the word itself is much older, and dates back to the 1860s. At this time it referred to a line drawn in or around a prison. If a prisoner went over the line, they’d be shot. Hence, ‘deadline’.
The word was made famous by a Confederate prison for prisoners of war called Andersonville in Georgia in America. Andersonville was known for having comfy cushions in each cell, fresh fruit for breakfast and massages for well-behaved inmates. Only kidding, obviously – it was notorious for its terrible conditions and, you’ve guessed it, use of deadlines. This is from a report on conditions in the prison from one Confederate Captain Walter Bowie (he knows Major Tom’s a junkie):
‘On the inside of the stockade and twenty feet from it there is a dead-line established, over which no prisoner is allowed to go, day or night, under penalty of being shot.’
Just to show you how awful Andersonville was, it was only open for just over a year, yet nearly 13,000 of the 45,000 prisoners of war died from lovely things like scurvy, diarrhoea and dysentery. This was probably due to the fact that it was overcrowded by four times its capacity. After the war ended in 1865, Captain Henry Wirtz, the camp’s commandant, was hanged for war crimes.
(By John L. Ransom – this image is available from the United States Library of Congress’ prints and photographs division under the digital ID pga.02585.)
So how did the meaning change to the less-shooty version we have today? Well, no one knows for sure, but it may well have been influenced by its use to describe a guideline on the bed of a printing press, after which the text wouldn’t print properly. Whatever the route, by the early 1900s people started using the word ‘deadline’ to describe any line that shouldn’t be crossed, and from there it wasn’t long before it became a synonym (i.e. another word for) a time limit.
(With thanks to my dad for telling me about the origins of this word.)
A mug my parents bought me. Just for any potential clients reading this – I’ve actually never missed a deadline. HONEST.