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For more information and our terms of use, go to bbcworldservice.com podcasts this is the KEEP your English up to date podcast from BBCLearningEnglish.com in this week's program, John Ato explores the origin, meaning and use of the phrase go postal In Britain.
The only hazardous situations postmen are likely to encounter are are having their fingers caught in a vicious letterbox and perhaps occasionally being bitten by an angry dog.
How different things are in the USA over the past 30 years, there seems to have been a spate of killings by American postal workers who've gone on the rampage and shot their colleagues, members of the public and police officers.
Apparently official statistics suggests that the murder rate at post offices is lower than that at other workplaces in the U.S.
nevertheless, perhaps it's just the strange idea of homicidal postmen, but for whatever reason, the image gradually caught the American public's imagination, and by late 1993 we begin to find the expression go postal being used, meaning to rush about in a murderous frenzy.
It got a burst of publicity with its use in the 1995 film Clueless, which boosted its popularity still further, and it entered the general vocabulary of everyday American English.
In the rather watered down sense, become extremely angry, as in mom will go totally postal when she sees what you've done to the car.
British speakers on the whole still treat the phrase as something slightly odd and unfamiliar, but don't bet against it catching on here.
That was the Keep your English up to date podcast.
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