Spam

The story

In the sketch, written by Terry Jones and Michael Palin, nearly every dish on the menu comes with Spam, and the word is said at least 132 times in about three and a half minutes. That is how it came to mean something repeated until it buries everything else. Players of MUDs, the text-based online games of the late 1980s, already called flooding a game with junk spamming.

On Usenet the word took hold on 31 March 1993, when an experimental moderation program misfired and posted about 200 messages in a row to one newsgroup, and a regular called it spam that same day. On 12 April 1994 two Arizona lawyers, Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, posted an advert into at least 5,500 newsgroups, and after that the word was everywhere.

Hormel, the company that makes SPAM, did not object to the slang, but asked that junk messages be written in lower case, to keep them apart from its trademark.

Why it matters

It is one of the clearest cases of an internet in-joke becoming an everyday word, and the 1994 advert broke the early network’s unwritten ban on advertising: commercial junk has flooded email ever since.

Where it is now

Spam is now the everyday word for unwanted bulk messages of every kind, and in 2019 it still made up roughly half of all email.