[HN Gopher] The Bloody History of 'Deadline'
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The Bloody History of 'Deadline'
Author : yamrzou
Score : 84 points
Date : 2024-05-05 09:23 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.merriam-webster.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.merriam-webster.com)
| aporetics wrote:
| > This concludes your exercise in pretending to not waste time
| while actually avoiding your deadline. Now: get back to work.
|
| I suppose this could serve as the unspoken signature line in most
| communiques. Thanks MW
| jacobolus wrote:
| So how did the 'due date' meaning arise? Was it related in some
| way to the prison line?
|
| Edit: according to wiktionary, in the 20th century it was used in
| the printing industry for a line on the bed of a press beyond
| which text wouldn't print, then by analogy as a time limit after
| which a newspaper story wouldn't make it into the paper. It's not
| clear if this sense was inspired by the Civil War prison dead
| lines, or made up independently.
| vharuck wrote:
| I was curious about this line in one of the letters cited:
|
| >Gutapercha ring making is all the go now by the men and some of
| them are making really beautiful ones.
|
| So wikipediaed gutapercha, which turns out to be a tree. The same
| name is used for a latex made from the tree. This material made
| undersea cables possible in the early days.
|
| But I was curious: why rings? Well, it might have something to do
| with the caning of Charles Sumner in 1856. Brooks, a pro-slavery
| U.S. representative beat Sumner, an abolitionist representative,
| nearly to death on the Senate floor with a gutapercha cane.
| Brooks' colleagues then wore necklaces with rings made from the
| shattered cane. So that letter might've come from a Confederate
| soldier.
| drewcoo wrote:
| That author:
|
| https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/heartsill-willia...
|
| The mention of Mr. Lynch a line or so earlier was another
| threat of violence on the prisoners. "Lynch" was still
| relatively new at the time, too:
|
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lynch%20law
| willwagner wrote:
| I believe the same tree was used for manufacturing golf balls
| for a time. Before that golf balls were originally made with
| leather stuffed with feathers but transitioned to be the "gutty
| ball" for 50 years or so until they transitioned to rubber and
| more modern materials.
| jacobolus wrote:
| Apparently in POW camps the confederate prisoners made gutta-
| percha rings (also crosses, etc.) out of gutta-percha buttons,
| as a way to earn some money.
| https://archive.org/details/immortalcaptives00josl/?q=gutta-...
|
| Seems like gutta-percha rings became a confederate symbol.
| https://esploro.libs.uga.edu/esploro/outputs/994936595870295...
| https://books.google.com/books?id=PUZyui6tt98C&dq=Gutta-perc...
| runoisenze wrote:
| For software projects, I prefer to call them "lifelines" :-)
| mortenjorck wrote:
| This apparent etymology is fascinating, but the article left me
| disappointed in failing to actually connect the spatial dead-line
| to the chronological deadline.
|
| There's a hint that it started to become used metaphorically
| toward the end of the 19th century, but without any examples of
| early usage or even speculation as to how a spatial metaphor
| became a chronological metaphor, the origins of the modern usage
| remain a mystery.
| levocardia wrote:
| I would not be surprised if there was a totally separate
| etymology for deadline in the chronological sense. Publishing and
| journalism have plenty of related terms, e.g. a "kill fee" for an
| article that is submitted but not printed. Always seemed to me
| that the meaning and etymology was self-evident: a piece
| submitted after the line on the calendar or schedule would be
| "dead," i.e. killed and not published.
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