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English Slang: Go postal
The United States of America has the world’s highest rate of mass murder.
The term ‘go postal‘ arises from many incidences of postal employees becoming angry and upset with their employer or coworkers.
Beginning in the mid-80s, there were yearly occurrences of post office shootings.
As a result, go postal entered North American English and means to become violent and angry, especially at work.
The US Postal Service never approved of people using it.
Every language has a life of its own, no one can control it, and the term stuck.
Saying an angry person is going postal was very popular when I was growing up in the 1990s.
It’s not so common these days.
In current times, we call mass murder incidences mass shootings.
That said, however, language always has a generational slant to it.
One generation’s language is not necessarily used by another, even though they may live and work together.
Whenever an employee becomes violent, angry, or both, middle-aged coworkers may say that person is going postal.
Now, I grew up in small-town, rural Canada, and we never had any incidents of anyone going postal.
We used the term jokingly.
For example, my father often went postal with five children running around his feet.
Don’t worry, nobody died or was hurt.
When someone went postal in America, though, it was a different story.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least an 8th-grade education (age 13-14).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 61.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.