We have discussed this before, but one of the jobs postcards tried to handle for two or three generations was nagging people to write. It was a rule of etiquette at the time, you see. If I write you a letter, then the ball is in your court. Now you owe ME one.
More often than not, it was a woman on the card demanding that letter (or at least a return postcard. The postcard was NOT a letter, and therefore it was appropriate for you to send one to someone who owed you a letter, because otherwise you were putting them under an obligation to do TWO letters. This is also reflected in the tradition of publishing postcards which expressed ecuses for not writing a letter yet. The sender knew this did not COUNT: you could not return a postcard for a letter. But you could keep sending your excuses on postcards, perhaps in the hopes that if enough time passed, you’d both forgot who owed whom a letter. I wonder how a telegram counted in this whole rate of exchange. I also wonder if we’ll get back to the subject of this article.)
One reason that a woman was demanding the letter was so that the cartoonist could use a joke substituting “male” for “Mail”. I have no statistics to show whether more men failed to answer letters than women. I suspect it ran about fifty=fifty. Rigid insistence on the Rules is not really linked to sex and/or gender.
I’m not sure whether the rules have continued into our primarily digital civilization. I know it never applied to email. Be more than five minutes about replying to an email from a co-worker at a desk eight feet from yours, and you get nine or ten emails asking whether you saw the first email.
In spite of all temptations, I have never been enlisted into the texting world. I blame this on my correspondents, really. I seem to be acquainted primarily with people who still use their phones to make phone calls. On the other hand, I’m the one who keeps his phone over there, being charged just out of reach. Responding to texts on a regular basis would mean having my phone at the ready, which I regard as dangerous. No, not that the poor old thing might explode, but that the poor old thing holding it will think, “Well, as long as you’re here, let’s play a few match 3 games.”
There’s no space here to go over the pros and cons of digital communication over the handwritten version. Yes, you save time by not having to decipher your correspondent’s handwriting. Yes, future generations will be largely denied the ability to read through old love letters of the rich and famous (it’s harder to delete a spicy letter than a series of sexts: in the good old days when you had a fireplace, there was a chance. Nowadays if you destroy a letter you have to hope AI has not figured out how to reassemble scraps from your shredder.) I WAS disappointed that one of the publishers I send a Christmas card every year no longer publishes its mailing address. Whether this disappointed them or will disappoint future researchers must be left to the future.
However, this whole digital revolution HAS threatened the male/mail joke with extinction. Go ahead, try to make jokes about emale. I bet you hear from HR about pronouns.
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