The deadline on Head Room was made more . . . interesting . . . by having nasty eyestrain. The trouble with eyestrain is that the easiest treatment is closing your eyes. I don’t know about you, but when I close my eyes for a period of time, it’s called a nap.
To avoid naps, I was listening to videos/podcast with my eyes closed. Including one by historian Heather Cox Richardson, in which she mentioned the origin of the term deadline . . . an origin that connected to Head Room.
She said the term stemmed from Andersonville, the notorious Confederate prison from the Civil War. With limited building material, the stockade fence was climbable. To prevent that, the Confederates added a line 20 feet inside the fence and shot prisoners who touched the line, even accidentally.
Considering I’ve had a lifelong close personal relationship with deadlines (including six a night as the copy chief for the Washington Post sports section), I was stunned I’d never heard about this. And there’s another twist. After being used in post-war trials about Andersonville, the term appeared to go quiet until it popped up in journalism in the early 1900s.
No theories that I found on why it disappeared, why it reappeared, nor why or how it transferred from being applied to a location to concerning time. If anyone knows more, please share!
How, you might ask, does the origin of deadline connect to Head Room? Aw, c’mon, you know what I’m going to say – you have to read the book to find out. 😉