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Like everyone else these days, we receive our daily dose of spam -- those annoying, unwanted email messages that clog up inboxes and promise to help you lose weight, make money working from home, or ummm, "enhance" certain body parts. But we never thought to question the origin of the term. To the Yahoo! search box we strode and typed in "junk email called spam," hoping that the results would prove more worthwhile than the typical spam message. Our first result, a post on a message board for Mumbai, India, got right to the meat of the matter. As most of us know, SPAM is that
mysterious meat product, but it's also the name of a popular skit by the British comedy troupe Monty Python. In the bit, a group of Vikings dining in a restaurant sing "Spam, spam, spam" repeatedly, annoying the other patrons and making conversation difficult. Apparently, when junk email started to make its bothersome presence felt, the majority of it was posted to newsgroups. As one informed poster states, "This large amount of unwanted crap made normal discussion impossible which reminded people of the Monty Python skit about SPAM. Thus everyone started calling these junk newsgroup mailings as spam." So the
spam drowned out real conversation. Even Hormel Foods, the makers of SPAM, corroborate this explanation and do not object to the term (as long as it's spelled in lowercase letters to differentiate it from their trademark). Although, if they had their druthers, we would all use the phrase "unsolicited commercial email" or UCE. But that's not nearly as catchy.
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