What have we stopped noticing?
The things we say, do, and accept without thinking twice.
“Deadline”
The date something is due, sharing its name with a line prisoners were shot for crossing.
Look closer where it comes from, what it assumes, and the case for keeping it
The date something is due.
In American Civil War prison camps, the “dead line” was a boundary that prisoners could be shot for crossing. The due-date sense appears around 1920 in the newspaper trade, probably by way of the printers' “dead-line”, a mark on the press bed beyond which type would not print.
If the two are related, missing a date borrows the shape of a lethal boundary. Almost nobody using the word has any of this in mind.
The prison-camp usage is documented. Whether the printers' term, and so the modern one, actually descends from it is not established.
The modern meaning is completely detached. Knowing the history changes nothing about a due date.
- We're on deadline · Grammarphobia
- deadline · Wiktionary