I know that they can be a big deal, but do we really need to be calling them deadlines? Must we invoke our own mortality when we’re talking about an RFP? Can’t we just call it a due date?!
Strangely enough, it turns out that deadline has a long, strange history and, sure enough, was used back during the Civil War to refer to a physical rather than temporal line, which, if crossed, well, yeah—let’s just say you wouldn’t want to cross that line.
I’ll allow a Merriam Webster word history post to explain:
The sense of deadline that is most commonly found today (“a date or time before which something must be done”) did not begin to see use until the early 20th century. […] The word began its life well before this, with our files indicating it was in use from the early 1860s, with the somewhat harsher definition of “a line drawn within or around a prison that a prisoner passes at the risk of being shot.” Some of the earliest mentions of deadline come up in 1863, preserved in diaries kept by captive soldiers during the Civil War.
I first encountered this quirky etymology back when I was producing content for Oxford Dictionaries, and featured this ghastly origin of deadline in a lurid listicle. While I left the world of dictionaries, leaving the office setting has not happened, so the term has haunted me ever since.
Doesn’t make it any less threatening, though!
Taylor Coe 