Carrier Pigeon is Slang for Email?
I was listening to NPR the other day and during a segment they kept saying to contact them by Twitter or Carrier Pigeon. I dismissed the discussion, but it did stick in my crow. Then today I received a call from a friend asking me if I knew anything about that new social networking community called “Carrier Pigeon”. I was stumped. After further research I discovered that this term “Carrier Pigeon” connotates an emerging slang term for email.
For years “Snail Mail” has been slang for the United States Post Office mail service, so now I guess it seems appropriate to poke fun of email because social networking sites like Twitter are the hip form of electronic communication. The carrier pigeon is obviously faster than a snail, so it has that going for it. But what does it say for the remaining electronic forms of communication that haven’t been tagged with a nickname yet?
Nicknames for modes of electronic communication
- snail mail = post office
- email = carrier pigeon
- twitter = pony express?
- text messaging = smoke signal?
- instant messaging = semaphore?
What do you think? Do you use Twitter, Facebook to communicate more than email? Is email a dying breed as the most popular online mode of communication?
Thanks to Ralph Solonitz for the illustration.
