somewhere along the line

alternative somewhere down the line

1. idiomaticAt some point in a process or in a series of events; at some unspecified or unknown time; eventually.

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

   1957 September 5, Jack Kerouac, chapter 1, in On the Road, New York, N.Y.: Viking Press, →OCLC, part 1

   4 more examples

   [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.

   1913, Arthur B. Reeve, chapter 1, in Constance Dunlap

   "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."

   1952 September 29, “The Atom: Enough Bombs?”, in Time, retrieved 17 Jun 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.

   2004 December 5, Mimi Spencer, “Chanel bag. Tick. Fauchon chocs. Tick. Pata Negra ham. Tick.”, in The Guardian (UK), retrieved 17 Jun 2019

   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.

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

   Synonyms: at some point, somewhen