Going Postal

Recently, I was working with vocabulary in an attempt to describe my latest adventures to an English-speaking friend and got to know about the colorful idiom “to go postal”. It means something like “go crazy with anger”; appeared somewhere between the 80s and 90s in the USA after a series of rather insane incidents in which postal workers went crazy and attacked people around, including colleagues and visitors.

The expression sounds funny at first glance, but the story behind the scenes is painfully gloomy. I think I will continue to use the good old “to go ballistic”. Literally, “get angry that strong so you become a rocket which lost control”. Or, to simplify, “explode with anger”.

By the way, there are similar rocket-like connotations in Russian, but for some reason they are about a more manageable cases. Mostly, they implies something like "the fire in the ass was so damn strong that the poor guy left Earth and successfully landed on Mars". Sounds a bit better than a simple explosion — you didn't completely waste the precious resource, at least :-)

8 May 2023 English