the.com/postage
Proof you paid someone else to carry your problem across a country.
means The fee you pay to have a letter or package carried and delivered through the mail system.
from Straightforward lineage: 'postage' comes from 'post,' the relay system of stationed riders and stations (from Latin 'positus,' meaning 'placed') who passed messages along fixed points across a country. Add the money-suffix '-age,' and you get the price of using that relay. The word itself is young compared to the system — stamps and fixed postage rates only became standard in the 1800s, when postage turned from a variable, often recipient-paid cost into the small, prepaid proof-of-payment we now lick or peel.
- first stamp
- penny black, 1840, britain
- before stamps
- recipients paid, so people refused letters
- price logic
- based on weight and distance, not love
- forever stamps
- value locked even as prices rise