Going postal
Going postal is a colloquial expression in American English that means something like “run amok ” or simply “freak out” or “go crazy” in German. It goes back to a series of rampages committed by American postal workers from the mid-1980s.
history
The expression came about after a series of rampages in which current or former employees of the United States Postal Service (USPS) mostly killed superiors and colleagues. Between 1986 and 1997, USPS employees killed over 40 people in more than ten rampages. Although there had been homicides by postal workers in the United States before, the rampage of postal worker Patrick Sherrill on August 20, 1986 was the first nationwide media attention. Sherrill shot and killed 14 colleagues that day in the Edmond , Oklahoma post office , injuring six more before killing himself.
On November 14, 1991 , former postal worker Thomas McIlvane shot dead four people and then himself at the Royal Oak , Michigan City Post Office .
As a result, the term spread as a synonym for rampage at work. The first printed evidence of the phrase is in the St. Petersburg Times, December 17, 1993:
“The symposium was sponsored by the US Postal Service, which has seen so many outbursts that in some circles excessive stress is known as 'going postal'…”
The expression was brought to a larger audience through use in dialogues of the teen comedy Clueless - What Else! known from 1995, when it was regarded as a "slang term" in need of explanation.
The American Dialect Society named “postal” or “go postal” in 1995 when it was voted “most original” and defined it as “acting irrationally, often violently, through stress at work “(“ To act irrationally, often violently, from stress at work ”).
The term was further popularized in 1997 by Don Lasseter's non-fiction book Going Postal: Madness and Mass Murder in America's Post Offices , in which Lasseter examined the background to the rampages in American post offices.
To counteract the bad image created by the new term, the USPS published a report on the safety of American postal workers in the workplace in August 2000, in the conclusion of which the term is described as a "myth" and an unjustified "bad reputation". Postal workers are no more violent than other workers and have a significantly lower risk of being killed on the job than employees in other industries.
Pop Culture
The computer games of the Postal series, which were heavily criticized and indexed in some countries because of their drastic depictions of violence, in which players can also shoot unarmed civilians, were named after the expression. The USPS tried unsuccessfully in a lawsuit lasting several years to ban the development studio Running with Scissors from using the term Postal .
The first part of the video game series was 2007 Uwe Boll filmed .
Terry Pratchett's 33rd Discworld novel Going Postal has a post office as its place of action; however, its employees do not commit murders. Rather, the theme of the novel is the (re) introduction of the dysfunctional postal system, so it is a play on the well-known term. The book was published in 2004, the German translation in 2005 under the title Ab die Post . This book was directed by Richard Kurti and Bev Doyle in 2010 as a two-part television film entitled Terry Pratchett's Going Postal .
The well-known phrase "Guns don't kill people, people do" was changed to "Guns don't kill people, postal workers do" and was distributed among other things as stickers or on T-shirts.
literature
- Mark Ames: Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond. Soft Skull Press, 2006, ISBN 978-1-932360-82-0
- Loren Coleman: The Copycat Effect: How the Media and Popular Culture Trigger the Mayhem in Tomorrow's Headlines. Gallery Books, 2004, ISBN 978-0-7434-8223-3 (Chapter 10: "Going Postal" available on Google Books )
- Don Lasseter: Going Postal: Madness and Mass Murder in America's Post Offices. Pinnacle Books, Kensington Publishing Corp, New York, 1997, ISBN 978-0-7860-0439-3
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Examining Workplace Homicide - Going Postal at trutv.com, accessed September 26, 2013
- ^ Going Postal Goes Abroad at themorningnews.org, accessed September 26, 2013
- ↑ Should US Postal Employees Have Guns? ( Memento of the original from February 24, 2004 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at hematite.com, accessed September 26, 2013
- ^ Ex-postal worker kills 3 and wounds 6 in Michigan at nytimes.com, accessed September 26, 2013
- ^ The Origin of the Term “Going Postal” at todayifoundout.com, accessed September 26, 2013
- ↑ Don't go postal: here's a guide to clueless' speak in: Chicago Tribune , July 26, 1995
- ↑ A Loqued Out Vocabulary For The Clueless in: The Courant, July 24, 1995
- ↑ Slang and expressions from Clueless ( Memento of the original from October 4, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. in: Jane Austen Society of Australia Study Guide, 1995
- ^ All of the Words of the Year, 1990 to Present at americandialect.org, accessed September 26, 2013
- ↑ a b Report of the United States Postal Service Commission on a Safe and Secure Workplace ( Memento of the original dated October 2, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 397 kB) at apwu.org, accessed on September 26, 2013
- ^ Postal court case dismissed at gamespot.com, accessed September 26, 2013
