| 词源 |
deadline. This expression has its origin in the infamous Con- federate prison camp at Andersonville during the Civil War. There the deadline was a line marked 17 feet from the camp fence. Any prisoner who crossed that line was shot dead by the guards. It seems that newspaper reporters and editors were the first to use the word in its present sense of a time when a task must be finished. They applied it to the time when a story had to be completed; if the story wasn’t in by that time, it was in ef- fect killed or dead for that edition. |