Mistä tule sana ’deadline’? | Lopunajan lauseet
Mistä tule sana ’deadline’?
Posted on elokuu 10, 2012 by Oona	Oletus
Hulluja hakusanoja on taas riittänyt, mutta kaikenlaisten ”sex with a zombie” -tyyppisten hakujen seassa huomioni kiinnittyi erääseen hyvään kysymykseen: Mistä tulee sana deadline?, oli joku netissä surffannut tiedustellut. Pahoin pelkään, ettei blogistani löytynyt etsijän kaipaamaa vastausta. Vastaavia pettymyksiä tulevaisuudessa välttääkseni (sekä koska itse painin tällä hetkellä deadlinen parissa ja tartun siksi innokkaasti kaikenlaisiin sijaistoimintoihin kirjoittamista välttääkseni) päätinkin etsiä kysymykselle vastauksen.
Yksiselitteistä sellaista en löytänyt, mutta esimerkiksi kustannustalo Random Housen Word of the Day-blogissa sanottiin näin:
The word deadline first appeared as an American coinage that referred to the line around a military prison beyond which soldiers were authorized to shoot escaping prisoners. According to Lossing’s History of the Civil War (1868): ”Seventeen feet from the inner stockade was the ’dead-line’, over which no man could pass and live.” This use is also found in Congressional records as early as 1864: ”The ’dead line’, beyond which the prisoners are not allowed to pass.” The citations for this use dry up at the end of the 19th century.
The other possibility is that the deadline we know today as ’a point in time past which something will not be accepted’ comes from an early 20th-century printing term. In the years before the first citation of deadline referring to a point in time, there are citations for deadline meaning ’a guideline on the bed of a printing press beyond which text will not print’: ”Make certain that the type does not come outside of the dead-line on the press” (Henry, Printing for School & Shop, 1917).
This origin for our expression looks even more promising because deadline in the time-limit sense was originally an American publishing term, indicating the time after which material would not make it into a newspaper or periodical: ”Corinne Griffith [the silent-era actress]�is working on ’Deadline at Eleven’, the newspaper play” (Chicago Herald & Examiner, 1920).
Vastaus kokonaisuudessaan löytyy täältä.
Online Etymology Dictionary puolestaan kuvailee sanaa näin: ”time limit,” 1920, Amer.Eng. newspaper jargon, from dead + line. Perhaps influenced by earlier use (1864) to mean the ”do-not-cross” line in Civil War prisons, which figured in the Wirz trial.
”And he, the said Wirz, still wickedly pursuing his evil purpose, did establish and cause to be designated within the prison enclosure containing said prisoners a ”dead line,” being a line around the inner face of the stockade or wall enclosing said prison and about twenty feet distant from and within said stockade; and so established said dead line, which was in many places an imaginary line, in many other places marked by insecure and shifting strips of [boards nailed] upon the tops of small and insecure stakes or posts, he, the said Wirz, instructed the prison guard stationed around the top of said stockade to fire upon and kill any of the prisoners aforesaid who might touch, fall upon, pass over or under [or] across the said ”dead line” …. [”Trial of Henry Wirz,” Report of the Secretary of War, Oct. 31, 1865]”
Että näin. Voinkin nyt ylpeänä sanoa oppineeni tänään jotakin uutta, kiitos blogiin hakukoneen kautta päätyneen surffarin. Kiitos siitä!