Spam

LEXICOLOGY

Do you know why employers don’t want to invest in a good spam filter? Because they want their employees to feel miserable! Statistics show 49.7 percent of our emails are spam and on an average, every individual has to spend 30 minutes daily to clean their inboxes. Thanks to United States, China and Russia - the top producers of spam in the world! (Statista 2018)

But as curious language learners, we’re really concerned about how the reputation of the word “spam” got tarnished. The people who originally came up with the word meant no harm; they just wanted a cool word for the canned food they were selling.

In 1937, Geo A. Hormel & Co introduced a new product to the American market. It was canned meat and potato starch and was called Hormel Spiced Ham. But Hormel’s brother, Kenneth Daigneau wasn’t happy with the name; to him, Spiced Ham as a trademark was too long and uncreative. He suggested his brother to shorten it to SPAM, a blend of “spiced” and “ham”. Kenneth, later, was also given $100 prize for this suggestion!

With time, SPAM became popular among the masses, and especially during Hitler’s rule, it became a staple in every household. Food shortages in Britain during The World War II made it difficult for the people to buy fresh meat since it was strictly rationed. So, they turned to canned meat. SPAM was being imported from America in huge quantities. After the war, SPAM remained an important part of the British diet, especially in cheap cafes. This brings us to the British surreal comedy group, Monty Python. In 1970, the group produced the SPAM skit on the British TV show Monty Python’s Flying Circus in which two people were sitting in a nasty cafe somewhere in Britain, where almost every dish contains SPAM. After a while, a group of Vikings started singing of which the only words were: SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM.” It was repeated so many times that it became annoying. With this, Monty Python got extremely popular; in fact, they were particularly adored by computer programmers. Now let’s talk about Multi-User Dungeons or MUDs, an early form of text-based internet game played in the 1980s. (It reminds me of Dark Room, a great story by Iqra Asad!)

People would use MUDs to show their programmes to others. The most popular of these programmes was a very simple practical joke. The first command in the joke programme was that the computer should print the word SPAM. The second command was to go back to the first command. The result was a screen full of Monty Python’s song lyrics that was just SPAM printed innumerable times. By 1990, SPAM had become programmers’ slang for anything trash on the internet. When the Monty Python joke was continued on Usenet in the early 1990s, the word “spam” gained popularity.

Spam was first added to a major English dictionary in the New Oxford Dictionary of English in 1998. It defined spam as “Irrelevant or inappropriate messages sent on the Internet to a large number of newsgroups or users for the purposes of advertising, phishing, spreading malware, etc.”

Hormel Foods got really worried about the growing negativity around the word “spam”. The company couldn’t tolerate their SPAM being referred to something unwanted and annoying. They even took this matter to the court but the bad “spam” had grown deeper roots. Everybody was using it so it couldn’t be dropped off from the dictionary. When the company lost the case, they decided to capitalize all the letters in their trademark SPAM.

In the end, I would say if Geo Hormel was alive he would definitely take back the $100 prize from his brother and fine him $10,000 for suggesting such an “irrelevant” and “stupid” name for his canned meat.

Reference: Chambers Dictionary of Etymology