Chrysti the Wordsmith > Radio Scripts

No matter our vocations or avocations, we all have them: deadlines, dates or times we must deliver or face the consequences.

Our 21st century notion of deadline differs from the original meaning of this expression. Though today it's a temporal demarcation, during the Civil War, when it was established, a deadline was a physical border.

The word was first used in a notorious confederate prison camp in Andersonville, Georgia. The prison was a stockade enclosing about 26 acres and designed to hold 10,000 captives. In August of 1864, Andersonville contained 33,000 Union soldiers, a third of which died of starvation, disease or exposure.

Lining the inside of the stockade all around was a fence about four feet high, standing twenty feet from the outer wall. Any prisoner attempting to cross this fenceline was considered an escapee, and shot dead by confederate guards. The fence was succinctly labeled the "dead" line.

In decades to follow, the expression was used metaphorically to delineate class or racial borders within towns. To breach this "dead line" was a social, but not a mortal, offense.

By 1920, journalists and editors had appropriated the term. A story or article breaching the temporal border was deemed dead to that particular edition; it had violated its "dead line."

Radio Script > Deadline