English-usage difference that will never stop tripping me up in Europe:
"so, will this come by mail?"
"mail? no we can't mail it, it will come by post"
(they think I mean e-mail)
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me, peering into the <s>mail</s> postbox: the <s>mail</s> postman has delivered us one single rubber band
my husband, doing his Odin voice: ish for me.
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@0xabad1dea So convenient! PostNL delivers our rubber bands to the ground all around the neighborhood.
@0xabad1dea now you have me wondering what the equivalent of "snail-mail" is in other languages
@0xabad1dea Do they call the mailbox the postbox there too? I know that a major difference in British English is that mailboxes are called postboxes instead. So the usage of "mail" as the conventional way to describe letter delivery really only started with email there.
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@neal I'm not sure I've ever heard a Dutch person refer to their brievenbus in English, now that I think of it.
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@[email protected] @[email protected] What do you even call that in english,
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@xaetacore in American English, it's a mailbox if it's at your house and a postbox if it's at the post office. I assume this happened because "postbox" is specified in laws and regulations somewhere but over time The People drifted towards "mailbox"
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@0xabad1dea @xaetacore If it's owned by USPS, it's a postbox. Since the ones that are at people's homes in the US are *not* owned by USPS, they aren't called postboxes. The drop-off boxes are called postboxes, since they are owned by the USPS.
@[email protected] @[email protected] English English would use mail or post interchangeably for 'is this thing physically being sent to me'. Here in Italy though, 'mail' is often used to refer to email in Italian so if you use mail speaking in English to an Italian they will often assume you mean email (and will often use mail to refer to email even in English)
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@mavnn @0xabad1dea @xaetacore same in German: we shorten email to mail and the German word for "post" is "Post"
(And I wouldn't be surprised if it is similar in Dutch)
@mavnn @0xabad1dea @xaetacore
NW England, we would take a letter to the post office or put it in a postbox. It would be delivered by a postman/postwoman (postie), and put into your letter box. We might say "It will come by mail," or "Is there any mail?" but I would expect to hear "It will come by post," or "Is there any post?" much more often.
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