I recently applied for a refinance of my home mortgage. You know the drill: Scour your files to find 800 gajillion pages of documentation to prove you're not a deadbeat. (By the end of this process, I was surely beat and almost dead.)

But why are people who don't pay their bills called "deadbeats?"

We sniff the trail like bloodhounds for clues, but in this case two very familiar words — "dead" and "beat" — throw us off the trail.

The "dead" in "deadbeat" means not "deceased, expired" but "absolutely, completely," as in "dead right" or "dead-on."

And the "beat" in "deadbeat" has nothing to do with hitting or pounding, but instead draws on another meaning of beat: to cheat or swindle. For example: "The gate crasher beat the amusement park out of its entry fee." During the 1800s, this verb spawned the noun "beat," meaning "a cheater or faker."

So a "deadbeat" is an absolute (dead) cheater (beat), especially someone who persistently fails to pay debts or expenses.

Hey, why are you looking at me?

Let's examine how some other "dead" words came to life:

— Deadline: In Andersonville, the notorious Confederate prison camp for Union soldiers during the Civil War, guards drew a line in the dirt 17 feet inside the fort's stockade and shot dead any inmate who crossed it. This demarcation, called the "deadline," soon became a general term for any strict time limit.

— Deadpan: This theatrical term for an expressionless face first appeared in a 1928 Variety article describing Buster Keaton as a "dead pan comic." "Deadpan" derives from an old meaning of pan: face, which also gives us "pancake," thick makeup caked on to an actor's kisser. So a "dead pan" was a dead face.

— Dead ringer: Forget the spurious claim that "dead ringers" originally referred to people mistakenly buried alive who alerted people above by pulling on ropes in their coffins attached to small bells atop their graves. Really?

In fact, here again "dead" means "complete," while "ringer" derives from "ring the changes" (to chime all the bells in a steeple in variable order). "Ring the changes" came to mean to repeat something in a variety of ways and eventually to replace something bad with something good. In horse racing, this meant to surreptitiously substitute a slow horse with a look-alike fast horse — a "ringer."

So a "dead ringer" now means anything that exactly resembles another. In my refinance application, I could have used a dead ringer — an identical twin who's much wealthier than I am.

Rob Kyff, a teacher and writer in West Hartford, Connecticut, invites your language sightings. His new book, "Mark My Words," is available for $9.99 on Amazon.com. Send your reports of misuse and abuse, as well as examples of good writing, via email to WordGuy@aol.com or by regular mail to Rob Kyff, Creators Syndicate, 737 3rd Street, Hermosa Beach, CA 90254.

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