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Chris -- 2018-04-11
First I heard a politician, being interviewed on TV in the aftermath of the recent election, mention being “caught up in a mail storm” of controversy. It immediately made me think of ‘maelstrom,’ a whirlpool, such as the one Edgar Allan Poe wrote about in “A Descent into the Maelstrom,” and often figuratively used to describe an overwhelming state of confusion.
Googling the term “mail storm” or “mailstorm” I found it being frequently used by computer network technicians to mean an excessive amount of e-mail messages that tax a server’s capacity to process it. These are often caused by viruses, but can also be caused by an event that attracts the attention of a large number of people who respond by e-mail. Some people seem to use it to mean simply “a lot of mail.”
Here are some quotations found on the Internet:
...immediately started to create a mail storm through out the Internet…
...since I did not want to cause a mail storm…
...The e-mail “storm,†as it was coined, was a double-edged sword…
... hundreds of networks were swamped by a mail storm of Melissa [virus] copies…
...you created a bit of a mail storm of a controversy when you wrote that…
...thinking about the time being wasted by all those other recipients of a mail-storm…
...The e-mail storm reached a peak on August 30…
...The mailstorm of last night (N. America) seems to have passed….
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Jim, nice eggcorn. A couple of us discussed maelstrom/ maelstorm/ mailstorm in the Forum before, but I think we didn’t do a very thorough job of the last part.
I analyzed maelstorm vs. maelstrom…
MaelSTORM (maelstrom) by jorkel Contribute! 0 2006-09-08 05:29:37 by jorkel
...and Ascared made a brief comment about mailstorm…
Ascared
Member
Registered: 2006-09-04
Posts: 20
E-mail Re: Movie Eggcorn (Intentional)I especially like Maelstorm and though it would be spelled differently (mailstorm) it brings to mind, my damaged brain anyways, the daily deluge of junkmail I find in my box.
I don’t know why I didn’t follow up on this earlier, so kudos to you. I think your contribution is a significant completion of it.
Last edited by jorkel (2006-11-10 10:42:25)
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Funny, I thought I searched for “maelstrom,” “mail storm,” and “mailstorm” before I started this topic, but somehow I failed to find the other thread. I can find it now.
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