The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

SPAM (not spam)

In 1937 a new product came on to the American market. It was made primarily of pork and potato starch and was originally called Hormel Spiced Ham because it was made by Geo A. Hormel & Co. However, a vice-president of Hormel had a brother who was an actor and presumably much better with words, and he suggested that it be shortened from Spiced Ham to SPAM. Another story says that SPAM may stand for Shoulder of Pork And Ham. Either way, the Hormel Foods Corporation insists to this day that it should be spelt with capital letters: SPAM, not spam.

Hitler made SPAM a great success. The Second World War caused food shortages in Britain, which caused strict rationing of fresh meat, which caused Britons to turn to tinned meat as it was less tightly rationed. The tinned meat to which the warlike Britons turned was SPAM, and this was shipped from America in gargantuan quantities. After the war, SPAM remained a staple of the British diet, especially in cheap cafés, which is where Monty Python comes in.

In 1970 Monty Python produced the SPAM sketch in which two people are lowered into a nasty café somewhere in Britain, where almost every dish contains SPAM. After a while, a group of Vikings who also happen to be in the café start singing a song to which the only words are:

SPAM

SPAM

SPAM

SPAM

SPAM

SPAM

SPAM

On and on and on ad infinitum et nauseam.

Monty Python is, for reasons best known to nobody, rather popular with computer programmers. There’s even a programming language called Python, based on their sketches. This leads us, inevitably, to Multi-User Dungeons, or MUDs.

Multi-User Dungeons are not, as you might have imagined, strange basement rooms in the red light district. Instead they were an early form of internet game that existed in the 1980s. Clever computery fellows would use MUDs to show each other programs that they had written, but the most popular of these programs was a very simple practical joke.

The first command in the joke program was that the computer should print the word SPAM. The second command was to go back to the first command. The result was that the lyrics to the Monty Python song would be printed out as a screenful of SPAM. This would scroll down your screen for ever and you couldn’t stop it.

By 1990 SPAM had become programmers’ slang for anything unwanted on the internet. When the Monty Python joke was continued on Usenet in the early 1990s the word spam gained wider currency. And that’s why, when that Nigerian prince with all the Viagra and the saucy photographs of Britney Spears started sending his emails, they were called spam, or more properly SPAM; for you must remember that SPAM is a proprietary name, just like heroin.