Pat Oliphant Delivers for You
A little insight into my process for deciding what to write about on a given week. First, I ask myself the following questions:
1) Have I written a post yet?
2) Is a holiday or particular comic's anniversary coming up soon?
3) Is there a notable news event that has been previously addressed in a given comic, or is currently being expertly lampooned?
4) Do I have any particular insight into a given comic that I have not yet discussed?
5) Has it been long enough since my last post about Marmaduke that I could write more about Marmaduke?
If the answers to the above questions are all "no," then I follow the arrow on my mental flowchart to this next set of questions:
1) Should I use up my one "Oh, jeez, I totally forgot that I hadn't written a post yet" card for this week?
2) Could I get away with rewriting a bunch of old Marmaduke punchlines so it looks like he predicted future world events with eerie accuracy, then post those?
3) If I were to mangle one of my hands with a hammer, how could I mangle the other one badly enough that my excuse of not being able to use a keyboard would ring true?
4) Did I bring my Work Hammer along with me today, or did I mistakenly bring my Weekend Hammer, which has a hollowed-out handle to use as a flask and cannot withstand sustained impacts such as smashing my own fingers to bits?
5) Do I have any Pat Oliphant cartoons I could group together in some sort of themed post?
That last one never lets me down. As promised in an earlier Oliphant-centric post, we're going to focus entirely on sweet drawings instead of the usual, more weighted considerations of our collective slide towards inevitable doom. Not to worry-- we'll get back to that soon enough, but for variety's sake, let us now turn our attention to Oliphant's decades-long disapproval of the U.S. Postal Service, as well as his ability to draw the hell out of that most personable of mollusks, the snail.
Before email was widely adopted as the preferred means of personal correspondence and/ or selling one another delicious Canadian prescription medications, Nigerian dowries worth millions, the mind-blowing ease of working from home and This One Weird Trick Discovered by a Midwestern Housewife to Eliminate Belly Fat Guaranteed, we had to send each other letters through the dumb ol' U.S. Postal Service, like a bunch of jerks.
Back then, we didn't know how easy we were about to have it, so any complaints lobbed at the Postal Service didn't necessarily have to suggest a preferable alternative. Most folks were just fine with saying things like, "22 cents for a stamp? What's next, 29 cents for a stamp?!" and "29 cents for a stamp?! That does it! I'm just going to sever all ties with distant relatives and let them think me dead!"
Pat Oliphant wouldn't be Pat Oliphant if he were content with mere grousing. Not only did he set about conjuring a terrific metaphor that would soon be widely adopted to make a distinction between the old means of message conveyance and the new, but he also made the illustration literal, since he's a cartoonist, not a columnist.
In gathering these cartoons, it occurred to me that Pat Oliphant is surely responsible for the adoption of the phrase "snail mail" as a common term once email came along as thing to which the Postal Service's, uh, postal services could be contrasted. The actual origin of the phrase is murky, at least as far as I could tell by looking at the top ten Google results-- Merriam-Webster has the first usage pegged at 1983, which is demonstrably untrue, as evinced by the six instances of Oliphant employing the imagery from 1980 and 1981 posted here, though this fellow posted an editorial from 1921 that claims to be the originator. Having given it some thought, I have to disagree, since I think it was more a case of that joker employing an easy rhyme than boldly forging a path towards efficiently dissing outdated shipping methods. Same goes for the first cited use of the actual term "snail mail" in a headline in a newspaper from Lowell, Massachusetts in 1942.
However, my contention is based on Oliphant's editorials' proximity to the need for a distinction-- Alan Turing was certainly paving the way for electronic communication back in 1942, but it'd be a few decades before anyone but nerds had access. Since newspaper readership was incredibly high in those heady days before BuzzFeed list-icles wooed us away with adorable gifs of cats chasing laser pointers, it's pretty easy to see how Oliphant's imagery could plant a seed in the minds of readers and lead them to take credit for being clever when they said "snail mail" around a person who had never heard the phrase.
Some might argue that, yes, technically, the headline from 1942 is most certainly the origin of the phrase, but I'd contend that those people are to be ignored, as they're not heaping praise on Pat Oliphant, who can draw snails better than happy hour at a snail bar staffed by attractive snail waitresses. There's a really great jukebox in case anyone's up for a slow dance.
Facts are slippery and demand research I'm simply not willing to undertake. I prefer to snuggle up in the knowledge I already possess, like how previous Oliphant retrospectactulars can be enjoyed by all, merely by clicking here, here and here.