SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The word deadline is in a lot of the news these days - tariff negotiations, ceasefire talks, budget deals. Sports teams face trade deadlines. And, of course, every day, we face personal deadlines to complete tasks. On this show, we have deadlines for interviews and scripts all through the week to make our deadline to be on the air live 8 a.m. Eastern time on Saturday. Where does the word deadline come from? Benjamin Dreyer is author of "Dreyer's English" and a longtime copy editor. Ben, thanks so much for being back with us.
BEN DREYER: Thank you for having me, Scott.
SIMON: What's the history of the word deadline?
DREYER: So the word seems to emerge during the American Civil War from the Confederate Andersonville military prison, where it was used to designate a line, either actually drawn or simply understood, beyond which if prisoners stepped, they would be shot to death.
SIMON: So the dead and deadline comes from dead?
DREYER: Exactly. It's a literal line, and it's literal death.
SIMON: When did the word begin to take on a substantially different meaning, where it involved doing something on time but not punishable by death?
DREYER: Well, as best I can tell, after that initial flurry of attention in the Civil War and in the post-Civil War, you know, during the trials that pertain to what happened at Andersonville, the word seems to sort of go into hibernation. And then it suddenly reemerges in the 1920s in journalism to denote the absolute last minute when copy can be sent to the printer. I wonder whether or not it just occurred independently to some journalist with a somewhat morbid sense of humor who may or may not have associated it with the Civil War use.
SIMON: I mean, I don't know about you. I don't think I've ever known a journalist with a sense of humor, have you?
DREYER: (Laughter) I hear that they're rare birds but that they do exist.
SIMON: Ben, when a word gets dragged through the news, does it begin to lose its meaning or at least change its meaning?
DREYER: You know, I think that there are certain words and phrases that suddenly just spring up out of nowhere, and everybody just keeps using them over and over and over again to the point of numbness and boredom. I mean, the one that leaps to my mind is, however many decades ago it is now, when everything had to be the mother of all something or others.
SIMON: That's when Saddam Hussein said that if the United States were to encroach into Iraq, it would set off the mother of all battles.
DREYER: Exactly. And then so everybody had to use it, and then everybody did use it, and then everybody got tired of hearing it. And then nobody ever uttered it again, which is - you know that's the cycle on these sorts of things. But I think that just sort of plain, vanilla words that suddenly become relevant because the issues that they define are relevant - like deadlines - you know, they hold on to their actual meaning, and they don't become sort of thorns in our brains.
SIMON: Ben Dreyer, the mother of all copy editors for many years at Random House. Ben, thank you so much for helping us out.
DREYER: Lovely to talk to you, Scott, as always.
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