Digital technology is filled with familiar words whose origins are easy to overlook. “Digital,” for example, ultimately comes from the Latin digitus, meaning finger, while the expression “surfing the web” was popularized by librarian Jean Armour Polly after she looked at a mouse pad showing a surfer. The history of “spam,” the word now used for unwanted email, is even more unusual.
The internet meaning of “spam” came through Monty Python
The digital use of “spam” is indirectly connected to SPAM, the canned meat introduced by Hormel Foods in the 1930s. The key step, however, was a 1970 Monty Python’s Flying Circus sketch built around the meat product. In the sketch, diners are surrounded by menu items containing Spam while a group of Vikings repeatedly sings the word so loudly that normal conversation is overwhelmed.
Early internet users turned the joke into online slang
The repetitive, intrusive nature of the Monty Python scene made it a fitting metaphor for disruptive online messages. In the 1990s, early internet users began using “spam” and “spamming” for unwanted or repeatedly distributed content, including unsolicited email. USENET user Richard Depew is credited in the source as the first documented person to use the term in this online sense.
Spam quickly moved from pranks to advertising
Many early spam messages were jokes or disruptive posts, but unsolicited messaging soon became useful to online advertisers. By 1997, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission was holding hearings on the growing problem and considering how it might be controlled. The agency ultimately left much of the response to industry, consumers and the marketplace at that stage.
Hormel objected to the unwanted association
Hormel Foods, owner of the SPAM trademark, was understandably unhappy that the name of its famous canned product had become associated with one of the internet’s biggest annoyances. The company pursued trademark disputes involving anti-spam services Spambuster and SpamArrest. Those efforts were unsuccessful because courts concluded that consumers could distinguish the food product from electronic spam. The result is the terminology still used today: SPAM remains the food brand, while “spam” has become the everyday word for unwanted digital messages.
