Have you ever wondered about the origin of words and phrases we use unthinkingly in our everyday conversations? As a writer and a life-long bibliophile I have always been fascinated by words and where they came from. A word that has really bugged me for some time now is ‘spam.’ I’ll wager that everyone reading this thinks they know what the word means but if pressed to explain its origins would end up scratching their heads and throwing their hands up in surrender. Now, if they were an obsessive-compulsive researcher like me, they would just look it up—which is what I eventually did. And the story of spam is . . . well, what else can I say but fascinating.
The spam that most of us know best are the ‘irrelevant or inappropriate messages sent via email to large numbers of recipients,’ and now the unwanted phone calls and texts that clog up your cell phone directory as well. What you probably don’t know is how and when this term got started.
I’ll get to that momentarily, but first I want to tell you about the other Spam™. Spam™ is the registered trademark for a widely popular and much maligned canned meat product made by Hormel Foods Corporation, comprised of mostly ham and chopped pork shoulder (ham is meat from a pig’s thigh while the rest of the pig’s meat is called pork), that was introduced in 1937. It became popular when it was used widely by American forces in World War II and by the end of the war was being consumed in over 40 countries around the world.
When I served in the U.S. army in Korea in 1979-81, a Korean army officer colleague of mine told me that Spam provided to the Korean population by U.S. forces kept millions from starving. He kept a can of spam on the mantlepiece in his living room in tribute to that. Spam, which stands for (Sp)iced H(am) was coined by Ken Dalgneau, brother of Hormel’s vice president in a contest to name the new product, winning him a $100 prize, but not a place in history, because I had to really dig through the archives to find that information. Spam is like some relatives, you either hate it or you love it (I fall in the latter category). There are those who completely disdain it and warn against eating it. Some of these are people who eat sausage which is made from some less savory parts of the animals and are not as a rich a source of protein. I’m with the Hawaiians, though, who have restaurants that serve Spam.
Now, back to how this canned meat’s name came to be attached to one of the most detested aspects of communications.
It all got started in 1970 with a Monty Python skit in a restaurant where everything on the menu contained spam, and ‘spam, spam, spam,’ became a mocking chorus sung by a band of Vikings to a customer who ‘hated spam.’ It just so happens that a large number of the geeks who were Usenet, one of the first online chat groups, were also rabid Monty Python fans and they picked up on the word ‘spam’ to describe excess data or noise that overwhelmed the net. In 1980s the term spam began to be used to describe excessive or unwanted emails, and now is being used to describe unwanted calls or text messages as well.
This kind of spam is pervasive. In 2001, it accounted for 8 percent of all email traffic worldwide and by 2010 accounted for 89 percent. Spammers use it to sell all manner of products and services (many unwanted or unneeded) and make millions, but that’s only a small percentage of what it costs the recipients of spam, especially the spam that’s used to commit Internet fraud.
Hormel Foods sued over the use of its trademark but lost. Rather than bemoan it, the company decided to take it good humor and even helped fun the musical Spamalot, adapted from the 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
The unfortunate conflation of the name for the food and the odious Internet practice hasn’t affected the meat’s popularity—unfortunately, it also hasn’t quieted its detractors. In 2007, Hormel sold its 7 billionth can and it remains one of the company’s top of the line products, available now even as Spam Lite, which is a combination of pork and chicken, and in a variety of flavors.
I’m still a fan, of the meat that is—I hate email and phone spam—with my favorite being fried spam and chunky peanut butter on sourdough toast.
Now, isn’t spam more interesting after learning its history? – NWI
