letter bomb

[Damien Hall]

Just a little addendum to the admirable coverage of _letter bomb_. Victor
mentions that there exist the perfectly good terms _mail bomb_ and _parcel
bomb_, which might in some cases block _letter bomb_ from referring to
anything but an actual letter. Despite this, though, as Victor shows,
_letter bomb_ has in some cases taken on the general function of _mail
bomb_, and seems to be the term of choice for metaphorical uses.

In BrE, the potential 'blocking effect' of _mail bomb_ wouldn't be as
great, as we refer to what's carried by the Royal _Mail_ (strangely) as
_post_; the people who deliver it are _postmen_ and _postwomen_; etc. We
don't call bombs of this type _postal bombs_, so any bomb delivered by post
here is a _letter bomb_, no matter what the actual form of the posted item.

Some raw ghits:

LETTER BOMB in .uk sites:  ~2,660

MAIL BOMB in .uk sites: ~710 (possibly incl also uses of _mail_ as a verb,
though the usual BrE verb for that is _post_)

POSTAL BOMB in .uk sites:  ~345

PARCEL BOMB in .uk sites:  ~834

(POST BOMB in .uk sites: ~4,890 - but this is polluted by many uses of
_post_ as a verb)


The first page of _parcel bomb_ hits includes an interesting example of
_letter_ 'mail item (of any size)':

Headline:  'BBC NEWS | Europe | Prodi survives parcel bomb attack'

Search-engine teaser: 'EC President Romano Prodi escapes injury after
opening a booby-trapped letter at his Bologna home.'

In the text, we find the device (which was a book) referred to both as a
_letter_ and as a _parcel_:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3351697.stm


FWIW, we also don't really have the term _going postal_ - if it was used,
it might be understood from context, but it would really be marked as an
'American' thing to say (unsurprisingly, maybe, as the story actually
happened in America!).

Damien

--
Damien Hall

University of York
Department of Language and Linguistic Science
Heslington
YORK
YO10 5DD
UK

Tel. (office) +44 (0)1904 432665
     (mobile) +44 (0)771 853 5634
Fax  +44 (0)1904 432673

http://www.york.ac.uk/res/aiseb

http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/lang/people/pages/hall.htm

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