Deadlines

What sounds ominous and feels threatening?

A very personal story

The line between alive and dead? I had to look up the origin of the word deadline, bandied around so often nowadays. Not many surprises there, I have to say. It does have a dark origin, or so I read, from almost 200 years ago, at the time of the American Civil War. It was a physical boundary, around a prison camp, but not the external solid one. It was more or less a fence. Imagine this fence being a deterrent against any escape attempt towards the actual enclosure structure. Anyway, approaching it would put the prisoner in mortal danger, trying to go over it made the word mortal mean exactly what is says. Shot without warning. By the way, it was called death line, as shown by a contemporary engraving.

Reference sources do not explain how a wartime term came to mean a borderline in time, not in space. I can only imagine that this is the point where I could wander off into the space-time continuum concept. I could but I won't, because I am aware of my ignorance of that matter. The word "deadline" itself, made up of two parts, pays tribute to modern sensitivities, and turns a noun, "death", into an adjective "dead", much more palatable. It is even more so through the diluting effect of not having an independent existence, being now more of an appendix to the perfectly neutral "line".

The scent of war and the consequences of disobeying borderlines have lingered on.A deadline carries with it all the dark aftermath surrounding it in olden times. Not sticking to a deadline, pushing through a particular barrier in time, rather than in space, is a badge of dishonour. The deadline is no longer a death line, unless repeat offenders, like me, view missing it as a step towards loss of self-esteem. In the real world, it is a foolproof way (beware the pun) of losing opportunities, jobs and friends.