Medical origin: used by doctors for patients with no chance of survival upon reaching care.
Modern use: applied to broken devices, failed projects, or ideas that never work.
The phrase is figurative, not literal, meaning it’s a way of speaking rather than a description of actual death.
It’s useful for quickly explaining that something is useless from the start.
The term originated in emergency medicine, where it described patients who were already dead when they reached the hospital.
In everyday language it now refers to any object, plan, or idea that fails immediately.
Knowing this phrase helps us describe situations clearly without using many words.
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