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SPAM

© Caroline Baker

It is perhaps one of the most dreaded words on the Internet.

SPAM

It is that barrage of information that you receive but never asked for. It is what clogs our email inbox. It sends people off to find new accounts or new terminate their accounts all together. It fear of viruses that lack onto our email addresses to cause havoc to our friends.

It's a reality of anyone's Internet life. There's just no escaping it.

Did I mention it's also a food product?

Spam, the food, is a brand of processed and preserved meats produced by Hormel. Because it can last for long lengths of time without refrigeration, it was very commonly used in camping trips or as rations. It was one of the choices of foods that could be kept in bunkers and bomb shelters.

It was also a food that people chose to eat. Yes. I'm among them. When I was little, my father would regularly buy Spam. We would slice it up, fry it, and use it in place of bacon or other breakfast meats. We could place slices of it into sandwiches with a bit of cheese, egg and lettuce. We would dice it and include it in our potato-egg salad.

I grew up not knowing that most of my peers detested the stuff. There was a certain stigma associated with this processed meat and that sent people quivering.

But that isn't why the excess email we get is called "spam." There are many foods people don't like but we don't go around calling our email "liver" or "fungus".

So how did "spam" get associated with email?

To understand this, you must first have exposure to Monty Python. One of the Monty Python's Flying Circus skits featured a diner where they served foods with a lot of spam in it. The punchline occurs when a group of vikings come out and begin to chant "spam, spam, spam, spam, lovely spam..." (For the full skit, go here.)

As it so happens, many of those early online were also Monty Python fans and had seen this skit. It's a bit disputed how it actually happened but one story goes as thus. A player in an online community called a MUD (multi-user dungeon) was frustrated at some thread of chat. So, like a child who would go "la la la" when they didn't want to hear anymore, he started to type into the chat the spam song from the Monty Python skit. He'd keep sending the repetative threads of that song over the chat, blocking out anything else anyone else tried to say. Soon people's screens where filled with useless lines... spam. That person was booted from the MUD and told never to return. The others who experienced it termed it as "That guy spammed us." Soon many were using it in that community to describe an abundance of useless information.

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