the.com/mail slot
A hole in your door trusting strangers to feed you paper forever.
means A narrow slotted opening in a door or wall designed for letters and small parcels to be pushed through from outside to inside.
from Straightforward compound: 'mail' comes from the Old French 'male,' meaning a traveling bag or pack — the thing a postal carrier once literally hauled your letters in — while 'slot' traces to Old French 'esclot,' a word for a track or hollow, later settled into English meaning a narrow opening something is designed to fit through. The device itself is a product of the organized postal systems of the 1800s, when door-mounted slots became a practical way to deliver mail without requiring a person to answer the door.
- origin
- Popularized in Victorian Britain to stop knocker spam
- dog hazard
- Classic sitcom booby trap for fingers and noses
- decline
- Now mostly feeds you pizza flyers, not letters