On to April's queries--with the goal of getting through them before the term starts.
On a visit to Colorado,
Chris was puzzled:
Lining the roads were expanses of trees, and every so often I'd see a sign nailed to a tree that said "Posted."
Nothing else.
We have signs like this in my native New York state, too, and many, if not most, other states--though whether they can get away with just saying
Posted might vary. The longer form of the sign would say
Posted: No Trespassing, and we could refer to the area of land with these signs at its borders as
posted land. In other words, the sign is saying that the land is privately owned (or at least not open to the public) and that you are not allowed to be on the land without the owner's permission, and that because signs have been 'posted' you have been warned of this fact. These kinds of signs, in my experience, are particularly used in wooded areas of countryside. This is the landowner's way of keeping away hunters, anglers, dog-walkers, (AmE)
hikers/(BrE)
ramblers, (orig. N. Amer. E)
snowmobilers, others' livestock, etc. This also gives rise to the transitive verb:
to post land--that is, to declare it off-limits by posting signs at specific intervals, as specified by state law. When I was a child, I was told that landowners were allowed to shoot trespassers if they'd posted their land. This, of course, was not true (though it could well have been true a longer time ago). These days, the penalties are fines or short jail stints and/or loss of hunting/fishing licen{c/s}es, depending on the state and whether the trespasser has hunted or has previous convictions. Click for miscellaneous examples from
Kansas,
Florida and
North Dakota.
The trend in (at least northern) Europe is toward public access to private land. The UK recently implemented the
Countryside and Right of Way Act (2000), informally known as the
right to roam, which allows anyone the right to (BrE)
ramble/(AmE)
hike on uncultivated land (but not to ride horses, camp, etc.). (Hunting privileges are another matter, about which I have no clue.) For other European countries, see
this Wikipedia article.
The
Posted signs are pretty opaque in their meaning in the first place, but probably even more foreign to BrE speakers, since the related adjectival meaning of
posted is used less in the UK:
2. Set up or fixed in a prominent place; displayed so as to provide information; advertised, made public. Now chiefly N. Amer. [OED: Mar 2007 draft revision]
As in:
1975 N.Y. Times 29 Oct. 28/1 There was ample time to peruse the posted menu of the day's cuisine minceur.
In BrE, one might be more likely to interpret
posted menu as a menu that had been sent through the (BrE-preferred)
post /(AmE-preferred)
mail. (
Mailed menu sounds a little odd to me in AmE--I'd probably say
menu that had been sent in the mail.) When I worked in South Africa, in the days before widespread e-mail availability, I lived for the post/mail, even though it largely consisted of recitations by my mother of who-ate-what when they went out to dinner last. All of my letters were sent to my work address, so every afternoon, I could be heard to be wondering whether the mail was here yet. One of my colleagues could always be counted on to offer himself as "the male". That trained me into saying
post fairly quickly.
Of course, the organi{s/z}ation that delivers the (BrE) post in the UK is the
Royal Mail, demonstrating that
mail isn't an AmE word, but that the senses and usage of the word varies across the two places. In BrE, it's more likely to be
the mail when it is in transit in large bunches, and more likely to be
the post when it is on its way from the post office to your door. Hence this entry in the OED (2004 draft revision):
2. a. A bag or packet of letters or dispatches for conveyance by post (more fully [Obs.] mail of letters). In later use chiefly: the postal matter (or a quantity of letters, packages, etc.) conveyed in this manner; all that is conveyed by post on one occasion. With definite article or without article. Also (chiefly in N. Amer.) in pl., and (chiefly S. Asian) with indefinite article.
The plural use mentioned here for AmE,
the mails isn't used all that much, and sounds fairly outdated to me. (Something that the
Pony Express might deal in, but not the modern-day
USPS.) But the 'In later use chiefly' bit in the above definition is more true of BrE than AmE, since the following use is equally dominant in AmE:
c. orig. U.S. The letters, packages, etc., delivered to or intended for one address or individual.
The OED goes on to note that
mail in AmE and AusE is also used to refer to the 'system of delivery and conveyance of letters, etc., by post', and notes:
The term mail (as distinguished from post) is currently dominant in North America and Australia, both for the system itself and the material carried. New Zealand retains post for the postal system, but mail otherwise. Britain favours post in both contexts. However, this pattern is not necessarily maintained in historically fixed collocations, such as Royal Mail, Post Office, Canada Post, Australia Post, parcel post, junk mail, etc. In the United Kingdom the word was formerly limited in ordinary use to the dispatch of letters abroad, as the Indian mail, etc., or as short for mail-train.
And thus AmE speakers tend to talk about
mailmen--or the less gendered
letter carriers--while BrE speakers tend to talk about
postmen--but I note that the
Royal Mail jobs website uses
postperson where space is at a premium, and
postman/postwoman elsewhere.
Postal worker is used more generically to include people who work in the post office or sorting office, as well as deliverers, and of course some high-profile cases of postal workers (orig. BrE, I think)
going mental and shooting people resulted in the AmE colloquialism
to go postal.
Of course,
postman is also known and used in AmE, as evidenced by
The Postman Always Rings Twice and
The Postman. This sounds a little old-fashioned to me in AmE, and I think Costner used
postman in his title because it sounds a little more exotic than
mailman. J. Robert Lennon's book title
Mailman, on the other hand, carries with it a more quotidian feel. (Is it perverse to use such an exotic word to mean 'everyday'?)
I suppose we can't leave this subject without touching on
e(lectronic)-mail. Much of the history of e(-)mail is situated in US Department of Defense (= BrE
Defence) projects, which is probably why we call it
e(-)mail, rather than
e-post. This, of course, led to the AmE coinage of
snail mail, but in BrE, of course, one can distinguish between the two types of communication by referring to
e(-)mail versus
post.
And with that, I'll post this blog post!
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