Personally, I prefer handwritten letters, so why would I want to disparage them? E-mail is fast and all, but then why didn’t you just call them?
There doesn’t need to be any special word for reading from paper. We’ve had that discussion before. Also, there’s no point in calling it “snail-reading,” as some people (myself included) read faster from a print source than they do from an electronic one.
I’ve heard the term ‘snail mail’ even before e-mail became prevalent. It was often used to refer to the ‘nth class’ mail, usually packages, which were sent the ‘cheapest way possible’. You didn’t care about speed, you just wanted to save on shipping costs.
I think I remember seeing an old MAD cartoon depicting the ‘U.S. Snail’, listed as ‘the slowest creature on earth’.
I’ll take a trip down the internet to get to the bottom of this. I’ll have to fit through my computer screen first, no mean feat. Then I’ll crawl inside the cables and wires in my quest for the truth.
I will see my answer if taglines throws off his bowler hat and becomes danbloom with karate kick moves while wearing his stilettos. Accipiter will need to rescue the day with his Kung Fu type moves as “Defender of the Drag on”
Truthfully, I had never heard the term until the advent of electronic messaging (which became ‘e-mail’) became the vogue inhouse in very large law firms in DC where I worked. That was back in the early 80s when PCs were only just being used by select firms who had the moxie to outfit all their individual offices with them. Prior to that time period which was really rather narrow until these became common place, most large firms in law and accounting used huge IBM (mag cards), Data Stream etc. monsters that were housed in one main area and were confined to word-processing or accounting massives which required heavy ventilation and cooling as well.
PCs had been in existence of course, but were not considered for mainstream usage by most though the military had been using them for some time. In-house messages were such an amazing technological advance that I was overwhelmed for all of about 60 seconds, but then, I’d been using the monsters for a good long time but had also been using small, compact processors at home as well.
There used to be a game we played where a phrase would be given and you had to make up a two-word rhyming term to define the phrase and I remember the one that may have been the foundation:
a sticky path left behind by a legless critter = ‘snail trail’.
