Once "email"* entered the lexicon, we needed a term to differentiate it from what we can call regular, hand-delivered mail. One term in broad usage is "snail mail." But in a project I'm working on, we need a term that is more formal and businesslike.
As currently written, the copy reads: "Terrestrial mail."
I'm looking for a good term to replace "Terrestrial." Any ideas?
(*AP Stylebook has eliminated the hyphen.)
Postal mail is the usual term when one needs to be formal. "Terrestrial mail" is not in use and would likely cause at least some confusion.
Simply "mail" by itself may be sufficient. If you need to specifically reference physical mail delivered by the Post Office then "Postal Mail" may be preferable.
It may be the case that postal mail is a formal term; I don't know if it is or isn't, but clearly it suffers from redundancy and ambiguity, and is used less commonly than regular mail.
Alternatives such as regular mail, physical mail, paper mail, and surface mail all have been used, as shown by a 1995-2008 ngrams for "snail mail,postal mail,regular mail,surface mail,air mail,paper mail,physical mail":
Every one of the terms has problems: postal mail, redundancy and ambiguity (does it mean threatening notes?); regular mail, ambiguity (does it mean email or paper mail?); physical mail, clumsy; paper mail, informal; surface mail, inexact (more paper mail goes by air nowadays). Physical mail is the only one of these terms increasing in use at the moment, but still is least used.
The term I immediately thought of is "postal service".
I've never heard it used to cover electronic mail and it scores higher in Google Ngrams than all the other terms, and it wasn't a newly invented term after the rise of e-mail. Also, it's perfectly formal.
One minor drawback is that it surely won't work as a drop-in replacement in all possible uses.
Just mail for the same reason there's no such place as East Virginia.
I suggest traditional mail, which nobody said. Anyway… I like physical, postal, or just plain old ‘mail’.
Don't overthink it. Simplicity is a big part of writing good copy. Just be direct and consistent across the text. Your reader will understand. Creating artificial verbiage to "sound formal" (i.e. convey authority) usually has the opposite effect.
In Canada, we use the terms lettermail (or letter mail).
Which is technically, Lettermail™, a trademark owned by Canada Post
I've added a Google trends chart (Covers 30 days) and on average it is outperformed by postal mail, but does hold its own.
Letter mail split into two words is even more popular, but it's not clear if this includes results with both words separately, like in "how to mail a letter"
For the exclusive purpose of distinguishing from email, you could probably use conventional mail. I am of course, aware that email is already quite the conventional mail today!
However, the common idea of that phrase is such that it still evokes images of postal, courier and other modes of physical delivery (you might have already considered physical as well), including surface, air and sea mail.
One way of avoiding the ambiguity is to use the proper name of the country's postal service. If one is speaking of sending something from the UK, one can thus say that it will be sent 'by Royal Mail'; if it is to be sent from the US, one can say that it will be sent 'by the USPS'. These terms have the additional advantage of distinguishing such services from those provided by the companies such as DHL or UPS (although that may be a disadvantage, if one wants a term that encompasses all of them, and puts them in contrast to e-mail). They also, obviously, cannot be used in a context that is intended to cover sending things from a number of different countries.
Another way of avoiding the problem is to just use the term mail and then use the term hardcopy in the characterisation of what is sent. If one says 'We will send you a hardcopy of the document by mail', it will be perfectly clear that the mail that is referred to is not e-mail.
I think that the answers were given by others, above. However, if you want to use a similarly silly word to "terrestrial," in relation to "mail," try tellurian, telluric, terrene, gaian, hyperchthonic (my coinage). Are you writing about mail on Earth as opposed to intergalactic, extraterrestrial mail?
