Deadline, Day of the Dead

If you read my old blogs, you won't be surprised to find musings about words themselves here quite often.

Today, I woke up with "deadline"

• It's Halloween, the Eve of All Souls' Day = Day of the Dead, Dia de los Muertos.
• I have a slew of deliverables for different jobs, due soon.
• If I miss my deadline, nobody dies! True fact! And yet I'm not alone (am I?) in experiencing the exhilaration of pushing the deadline, the value of this in making sure something gets done.

Let's hang with that exhilaration a moment. It feels good, doesn't it? First the pressure, then its release; the recognition that this arbitrary, invisible, "dead" line was a device to get you and your creative powers to where you were going anyway. 
Deadlines don't seem very dead, if they're even lines at that.

Deadlines can be soft or hard. Soft, where you prod at them and they fold out to give you a couch to sleep on for a few hours to muster your grand finale. Hard, where you ricochet off their taut edge, mercifully far, far from the voice on the other side telling you too late, not good enough, fired. Or, you get there in time, proud and pleased, and are accepted as a matter of course, your adrenaline the only drumroll.

In other words, a deadline is more like a live wire. Most etymological dictionaries will tell you that the word originally referred to a cordon around a prisoner-of-war jail in the Civil War: a line beyond which prisoners would be shot down in attempts to escape. This actual, physical, spatial "line" was then adapted metaphorically in journalistic jargon in the US in the 1920s. 

Co-opting of something physical/spatial to  refer to time is pretty common in language. The universe is full of our invisible lines. But the comparison of a journalist's time constraints with attempts to escape a prison camp seems, well, dramatic, doesn't it? 

On the other hand, since we're in the realm of metaphor, although nobody dies if I miss my deadline, be it journalistic or poetic, I feel more alive if I create. Creating is making of life.

This is the time of year when the distance between Living and Dead beings is the shortest. So, rather than make some facile plea to rename deadlines as livelines, this week I'm going to explore the creativity of the dead, and the liveliness of arbitrary lines.