Deadline

Deadline (pronounced ded-lahyn)

(1) The time by which something must be finished or submitted; the latest time for finishing something.

(2) A line or limit that must not be passed; a time limit for any activity.

(3) Historically, a boundary around a military prison beyond which a prisoner could not venture without the risk of being shot by the guards.

(4) A guideline marked on a plate for a printing press, indicating the point beyond which text would not be printed (archaic).

(5) Historically, a fishing line that has not for some time moved (indicating it might not be a productive place to go fishing).

(6) In military use, to render an item non-mission-capable; to remove materiel from the active list (available to be tasked); to ground an aircraft etc.

1864: The construct was dead + line.  Dead was from the Middle English ded, from the Old English dead (having ceased to live (also “torpid, dull” and of water “still, standing, not flowing”), from the Proto-Germanic daudaz (source also of the Old Saxon dod, the Danish død, the Swedish död, the Old Frisian dad, the Middle Dutch doot, the Dutch dood, the Old High German & German tot, the Old Norse dauðr and the Gothic dauþs), a past-participle adjective based on dau-, which (though this is contested by etymologists) may be from the primitive Indo-European dheu- (to die).  Line (in this context) was from the Middle English line & lyne, from the Old English līne (line, cable, rope, hawser, series, row, rule, direction), from the Proto-West Germanic līnā, from the Proto-Germanic līnǭ (line, rope, flaxen cord, thread), from the Proto-Germanic līną (flax, linen), from the primitive Indo-European līno- (flax).  The development in Middle English was influenced by the Middle French ligne (line), from the Latin linea (linen thread, string, plumb-line (also “a mark, bound, limit, goal; line of descent”)).  The earliest sense in Middle English was “a cord used by builders for taking measurements” which by the late fourteenth century extended to “a thread-like mark” which led to the notion of “a track, course, direction; a straight line.  The sense of a “limit, boundary” dates from the 1590s add was applied to the geographical lines drawn to divide counties.  The mathematical sense of “length without breadth” (ie describing the line drawn between points (dimensionless places in space)) was formalized in the 1550s and in the 1580s the “equatorial line was used to describe the Earth’s equator."  Other languages including Dutch, Finnish, Italian & Polish picked up deadline from English in unaltered form while the word also entered use in many countries for use in specific industries (journalism, publishing, television, printing etc).  Deadline & deadliner are nouns; deadlining & deadlined are verbs and postdeadline is an adjective; the noun plural is deadlines.

In the oral tradition, a deadline (which probably should be recorded as “dead line”) was a fishing line which for some time after being cast, hadn’t moved, indicating it might not be a productive place to go fishing.  The source of the first formalised meaning (a line which must not be crossed) was a physical line, the defined perimeter boundary line of prisoner of war (PoW) caps during the US Civil War (1861-1865): Any prisoner going beyond the “deadline” was liable to being shot (and thus perhaps recorded as “SWATE” (shot while attempting to escape).  Despite the name, the Civil War records indicate the deadline was rarely marked-out as a physical, continuous line but was instead defined by markers such as trees, signposts or features of the physical environment.  However, the word appears not to have caught on in any sense until 1917 when it was used to describe the guideline on the bed of printing presses which delineated the point past which text would not print.  It seems that the word migrated from the print room to the news room because by 1920 it was used in journalism in the familiar modern sense of a time limit: Copy provided after a specified time would not appear in the printed edition because it has “missed the deadline”.  From this use emerged “postdeadline” (after the deadline has passed) which sometimes existed on a red stamp an editor would use when returning copy to a tardy journalist, “deadliner” (a journalist notorious for submitting copy only seconds before a deadline) and the “deadline fighter” (a journalist who habitually offered reasons why their postdeadline copy should be accepted for publication).  Writers often dread deadlines but there are those who become sufficiently successful to not be intimidated.  The English author Douglas Adams (1952–2001), famous for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) wrote in the posthumously published collection The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time (2002): “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by”.  Few working journalists enjoy that luxury.  Other similar expressions include “zero hour”, “cutoff date” and the unimaginative “time limit”.  Deadline was unusual in that it was one of the few examples of the word “dead” being used as a word-forming element in its literal sense, another being “deadman”, a device used mostly in railways to ensure a train is graceful brought to a controlled stop in the event of the driver’s death on incapacitation.

The meaning shift in deadline was an example of an element of a word used originally in its literal sense (dead men SWATE) changing into something figurative.  Other examples of the figurative use of the element include “dead leg”, deadlock, dead loss, dead load, dead lift, dead ringer, dead heat and dead light.  The interesting term “dead letter” has several meanings.  In the New Testament it was used by the Apostle Paul in his second letter to the Corinthians (2 Corinthians 3:6) to contrast written, secular law with the new covenant of the spirit.  Paul’s argument was that legal statutes, without the Spirit, were powerless to bring about salvation and were therefore “dead letter” whereas the new covenant, based on the Spirit, brings life:  “He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant--not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” (2 Corinthians 3:6).  So, law devoid of the power of the Holy Spirit to interpret and apply it is a “dead letter” that can never be transformative, unlike the new covenant which is based on a living relationship with God through the Holy Spirit.

In a post office, a “dead letter” (which can be a “dead parcel”) is an item of mail which can neither be delivered to its intended recipient nor returned to the sender, usually because the addresses are incorrect or the recipient has moved without leaving a forwarding address.  Within postal systems, there is usually a “dead letter office” a special department dedicated to identifying and locating the sender or recipient.  If neither can be found and the item is unclaimed after a certain time (and in many systems there are deadlines), it may be opened and examined for any identifying information that could be used to identify either and if this proves unsuccessful, depending on its nature, the item may be destroyed or sent to public auction.  Beyond the Pauline and the postman, “dead letter” is a phrase which refers to (1) a law or regulation which nominally still exists but is no longer observed or enforced and (2) anything obsolescent or actually obsolete (floppy diskettes, fax machines et al).  In law, some examples are quite famous such as jurisdictions which retain the death penalty but never perform executions.  There have also been cases of attempting to use the “dead letter” law as an expression of public policy: In Australia, as late as 1997, the preferred position of the Tasmanian state government was that acts of homosexuality committed by men should remain unlawful and in the Criminal Code but that none would be prosecuted, the argument being it was important to maintain the expression of public disapproval of such things even if it was acknowledged criminal sanction was no longer appropriate.  There may have been a time when such an approach made political sense but even before 1997, that time had passed.  As is often the case, law reform was induced by generational change.

Founded in 2009 (an earlier incarnation Deadline Hollywood Daily had operated as a blog since 2006), deadline.com is a US film and entertainment news & gossip site now owned by Penske Media Corporation.