somewhere along the line

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somewhere along the line

1. (idiomatic) At some point in a process or in a series of events; at some unspecified or unknown time; eventually.
   • 1913, Arthur B. Reeve, chapter 1, in Constance Dunlap:

     [I]t was only a question of time, after all, when the forgery would be discovered. […] "Somewhere along the line that check has been stolen and raised to twenty-five thousand dollars," he remarked.

   • 1952 September 29, “The Atom: Enough Bombs?”, in Time‎^[1], retrieved 17 June 2019:

     "I think it is quite obvious," he said, "that the current atomic-arms race can not go on forever. Somewhere along the line […] we will have acquired all the weapons we would possibly need."

   • 1957, Jack Kerouac, chapter 1, in On the Road, Viking Press, →OCLC, part 1:

     Somewhere along the line I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.

   • 2004 December 5, Mimi Spencer, “Chanel bag. Tick. Fauchon chocs. Tick. Pata Negra ham. Tick.”, in The Guardian (UK)‎^[2], retrieved 17 June 2019:

     Somewhere along the line, Christmas became the year's fattest festival. It lost its already tenuous association with the sacred and became a wham-bam, all-u-can-eat, deep-fill stufferama.

   • 2024 July 27, Hannah Ewens, “‘Do you mind listening to that with headphones?’ How one little phrase revolutionised my commute”, in The Guardian‎^[3], →ISSN:

     I don’t think people even realise they are doing this. Somewhere along the line this became normal – almost certainly during the pandemic, when we collectively decided that every conscious moment had to be filled with visual and audio content, before we were told to return to society.

• at some point, somewhen; see also Thesaurus:sometime