Dead Heat

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hi, who’s this?

Amy Charpentier from Quincy, Massachusetts.

All right, well, what’s on your mind, Amy?

Well, being so close to New Hampshire, we hear a lot about the primaries and everything going on.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, so we’ve been hearing an expression, dead heat, a lot lately.

And I was wondering, where exactly does that come from?

It sounds very odd that you’d be talking about something being dead or dead heat.

Ooh, that’s a good one.

What a really good one.

You just picked one that you could break that apart into two really interesting word histories.

Right.

Congratulations, Amy.

Thank you.

Bonus, you win the prize.

Ding, ding, ding.

Whatever it is.

Break it down into two parts, dead and heat.

Dead actually isn’t about lack of life in this case.

Right.

It’s just an intensifier.

It means absolute or exact or utter.

It’s the same dead that you see in deadlock, which has got a relationship, of course, of dead heat.

So the heat, on the other hand, is even more strange than that.

In this case, it means something like a single continuous effort or one great burst of energy.

These days, you’ll most often find it in horse races, which is very interesting since political campaign coverage has often been compared to horse races.

So does that make sense to you?

Yes, definitely.

The little research that I did is I found on horse racing.

Right.

Right.

So a heat is a race, right?

When horses run against each other?

That particular use that’s specific to horse racing is the one that we’ve borrowed into other sports and borrowed into politics.

But the older form, which actually still exists in a few places, is a little more general.

It’s all about that one burst of activity.

It’s kind of like you count all the different activities and each one of them is a heat.

In any case, two really strange words that sound like words that we use every day,

But they have very divergent meanings, don’t they, Amy?

Yes, they do.

It just sounds so grim to me when they use it in political races.

No, no.

Think about if you say that somebody is dead on.

They say something that’s the correct answer.

We’re not actually talking about death.

It’s not a bullet in the forehead or anything like that.

Or a dead ringer, you know.

So-and-so’s a dead ringer for George Clooney or something.

Right.

Thank you, Martha.

I think I am.

I was going to say.

So how do we do there, Amy?

Is that all right?

Very good.

Super duper.

Thank you so much for your call.

Take care of yourself.

Bye-bye, Amy.

Bye-bye.

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