Snail mail

Painted cupboard with a snail motif. Peasant Painting Museum Trautenfels .

Snail mail used to be called postal deliveries whose delivery time was significantly higher than the average. Today the term in English ( snail mail ) is sometimes used for each traditional letter post compared to e-mail due to the unequal delivery speed .

history

The term comes from the stagecoach era , when, for example, a wheel breakage or a change in the weather could cause significant delays, and it still stands for slow transport, including lengthy and extremely late delivery of mail. In 1821, Ludwig Börne published his satirical monograph on the German postal snail , in which slow and uncomfortable travel in Thurn-und-Taxis' stagecoaches became a symbol of repression and the spirit of submission.

A children's song from the German Empire (1871–1918) contains the stanza:

Ri-ra-rutsch
We go with the carriage We go with the
snail
mail where it doesn't cost a penny
Ri-ra-rutsch
We go with the carriage

In old children's picture books, a snail brings the animals of the forest the mail.

However, the term snailmail also attracted particular attention in the 1980s and 1990s within the privately networked computer systems via telephone modems that used the globally spun FidoNet . The public use of the Internet was not yet widespread at this time (see: Chronology of the Internet ).

The transmission of electronic messages in almost real time , as is possible today with the help of e-mails over the Internet, was not yet known. Rather, the first electronic messages were sent via FidoNet by users as so-called Snailmail , even if the official term would have been Netmail or Echomail . However, since it usually took several days before the electronic message actually reached the recipient via the privately operated computer systems (zones and nodes), the term Snailmail for sending messages among users was anchored in the worldwide FidoNet.

Since mail in English can mean both e-mail and letter post, a distinction is usually made between e-mail and regular mail or snail mail (also s-mail ).

Web links

Wiktionary: Schneckenpost - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Commons : Snail Mail - collection of images, videos and audio files

Commons : Snail mail - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Ludwig Börne: Monograph of the German postal snail on zeno.org

Individual evidence

↑ Hermann Glaser: On the cultural change in meaning of traffic in human history , section Bumpy progress of the post . P. 61 in: Oliver Schwedes, Weert Canzler, Andreas Knie (eds.) Handbook of Transport Policy . Springer-Verlag, 2nd edition, 2015 ISBN 978-3-658-04692-7 (information on Börne's monograph on the German postal snail)
↑ Ri-ra-slip! In: Volksliederarchiv. Retrieved March 12, 2018 .
↑ Ida Bohatta: Snail Mail . Munich: J. Müller, 1951. DNB 450542335

[1] Hermann Glaser: On the cultural change in meaning of traffic in human history , section Bumpy progress of the post . P. 61 in: Oliver Schwedes, Weert Canzler, Andreas Knie (eds.) Handbook of Transport Policy . Springer-Verlag, 2nd edition, 2015 ISBN 978-3-658-04692-7 (information on Börne's monograph on the German postal snail)

[2] Ri-ra-slip! In: Volksliederarchiv. Retrieved March 12, 2018 .

[3] Ida Bohatta: Snail Mail . Munich: J. Müller, 1951. DNB 450542335