When you look up the word ‘spam’ in the Oxford English Dictionary, you’ll be presented with two primary listings:
- Irrelevant or unsolicited messages sent over the Internet, typically to a large number of users, for the purposes of advertising, phishing, spreading malware, etc.
- (Spam) A tinned meat product made mainly from ham.
These days, the first entry is probably used more broadly. But what you may not realise is that ‘spam’ in the email sense is actually derived from the tinned meat. In this post, we’re going to explore how that linguistic shift came about.
Monty Python – Spam
In an episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus that aired in the 1970s, patrons are seated in a restaurant enquiring about the day’s menu items. However, it appears that every dish includes at least a little Spam (i.e. ‘spiced ham’ from a tin). The more they enquire, the more spam appears in each dish. By the end of the sketch, a dish that previously featured ‘egg, bacon, sausage and Spam’ now only consists of ‘Spam, Spam, Spam and Spam’.
In other words, Spam was taking over the menu, much the same as spam email messages can take over an inbox today. The use of ‘spam’ in this sense actually makes a lot of sense when you place it in cultural context and consider the fact that the earliest chatrooms were going online at a time when this episode was still in the recent memory of active users. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFrtpT1mKy8
The 1st Time Spam Was Used to Describe ‘Internet Junk Mail’
The first time that the word ‘spam’ was used in this sense actually arose from an innocent-enough affair. In 1993, Usenet administrator Richard Depew was responding to a discussion group, but he accidentally posted 200 duplicate responses to the board.
All of the group members who were involved in that particular discussion were inadvertently ‘spammed’. The act was likened to episode the aforementioned episode of Monty Python.
Of course, chasing down the early uses of this word from a time when the Internet was far from mainstream is a challenge. Some even suggest that the term was already being applied on early chat systems in the 1980s. In those days, some users were trolling chatrooms with unwanted text. Some say that these trolls even posted blocks of text that said ‘spam spam spam spam…’ in direct tribute to Monty Python.
In that sense, it’s probably safe to assume that ‘spammy’ behaviour was already being identified with this word in the 1980s. Later in the 1990s, it was officially canonised with instances that are still available in the public record.
A Nuisance by Any Other Name
Regardless of what you call it, email spam is more of a problem today than ever before. Fortunately, MailCleaner is here to help. Contact us today if you’re looking for an effective way to protect your email accounts against spam, viruses and malware, and we’ll show you how our filters can block up to 99 per cent of unwanted messages in your inbox.