Word: mailbox
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...whose dislike of metaphors leads him to compose-laboriously-one-word poems (Domecq explains that his "Beret" had a poor reception, "perhaps attributable to the demands it makes on the reader of having to learn French"). There is Santiago Ginsberg, a poet who assigns private meanings to public words ("mailbox," to him, translates as "accidental, fortuitous, incompatible with a cosmos"). Adalberto Vilaseco devotes his career to publishing the same poem under different titles. Forbidden by his religion from drawing likenesses of the world, Artist José Enrique Tafas carefully paints Buenos Aires street sights and then entirely blackens them with...
...sorts of propaganda. One of our most frequent correspondents was a woman named Madalyn Murray O'Hair, the self-appointed apostle of American atheists. The way she handled Christmas was not to fight it, but to join it. Christmas, she announced in a brochure that appeared in our mailbox one day in early December, was not in fact a Christian holiday at all. Its origins lay in the ancient pagan celebration of the winter solstice. And for just a few dollars, you could buy some lovely winter solstice cards to send to all your friends and let them know just...
Breaking some mailbox rules can bring fines or jail sentences. For example, "destruction of letter boxes or mail" carries a penalty of up to three years or $1,000. Also, no one can put anything in a mailbox that doesn't bear postage, and no one other than the owner, his agent or the letter carrier can take anything out. The person who puts mailable material into mailboxes himself to avoid payment of postage faces a maximum fine of $300 per offense. The Postal Service claims that otherwise mailboxes might become overstuffed and the security of the mail weakened...
...major problem with private delivery to mailboxes is that the Government monopoly would be undermined. The law has long banned competition from private mail services, and it was tightened in 1934 after public utilities started delivering their own bills. The law does permit home delivery of newspapers to a separate box and private delivery of such non-first-class material as magazines and ad circulars that can be hung on doorknobs, in plastic bags, or pushed through a mail slot in the door. But in the mailbox itself, only mail with U.S. postage is legal. Without a monopoly, the service...
...mailbox remains an odd "private federal preserve, established and maintained at the expense of the individual owner," as the Evening Journal of Wilmington, Del., recently complained. Rural homeowners will have to go on putting up with such advice as is contained in Form 4056: "Your mailbox needs attention." But the Postal Service still offers the time-honored advice that whatever the restrictions, "this does not mean that you may not meet your carrier at the door if you desire and greet him as cordially as ever." After all, he probably has a mailbox...