I bet you’re wondering what the Editor-in-Chief has to say for this weblog. So am I. What with having to proofread and edit and arrange for the printing of the magazine, coupled with a healthy dose of forgetfultude and a misplacement of the weblogging schedule, post is being made a month after it was due. My only defense is to cry “writer!” and expect that it will be sufficient explanation for my late entry. Unfortunately, I already cried “editor!” and if I admit to missing deadlines than I admit to my incompetence.

So instead I’m going to cry “historian!” and provide a little etymological lesson on the most troublesome word to writers and editors alike. “Deadline” has been used in the newspaper industry for nearly 100 years to describe the date and time when a story is due. But as few reporters have been killed for missing deadlines, it’s unlikely the word’s origins begin there.

I like to believe the word began in the Wild West, when a cowboy would dare their adversaries to cross a line he drew in the sand with a stick. He’d keep drawing lines until he dared his opponent out of town and off a cliff, though, inconsistently with the word, the fall was never fatal. When I envision such a scenario one cowboy is always a rabbit and the other is Yosemite Sam. This leads me to believe that this is a false etymology.

A quick jaunt over to the World Wide Web gives me a straight answer. “Deadline” was first used during the American Civil War to describe a perimeter made around prisoner-of-war camps. Any prisoner who crossed the “deadline” would be shot. Well, isn’t that jarringly simple and ghastly? I’m going to ignore it.

Instead, I proffer my own explanation. During the high middle ages, King Cordonbleu was the most beloved king in all the land, and he reciprocated that love upon his people with utmost generosity and respect. One day a knight asked if his nephew could read the king a poem. The king, true to his character, cordially obliged. The kid walks in pushing a pile of parchment on a handcart. “Ode to the Chamber Pot,” he begins.

He reads well into the night, but the king stays awake rather than rudely go to bed. By the third day the king has grown frail and weak, though still refuses to interrupt the child rather than eat. The child, youthful and spry, is in no bad shape. On the fifth day the king dies, the child usurps his throne, and line 46,039 of “Ode to a Chamber Pot” is thenceforth known as “the dead line.”

As time went on, “deadline” came to refer to the point at which a poem or story must be finished before the listener dies. Later monarchs decided to kill the writer before the writer killed them, and the term reversed on itself. Eventually, as kings founded news outlets as a vehicle for crossword puzzles, the term no longer applied to when a story finishes but when a story is finished, its present usage.

Now, however, we have cast off the shackles of totalitarian rule to live in a democracy. Do not misconstrue my having missed the deadline as demonstration of laziness. It is an exaltation of freedom.