We all know it. Some of us have eaten it. And we know it’s bad for us. But what is it?
The original Spam, from the 1930s, was a brand of tinned (canned) food convenient for camping and long-term storage. Marketed as an abbreviation for ‘spiced ham’ in fact it consisted of pre-cooked pork, a bit of ham, various emulsifiers and a coating of aspic. Yum.
Then along came the Monty Python team who created a sketch in the 1970s featuring people in a cafeteria where everything on the menu includes spam, such as this item: Lobster Thermidor aux crevettes with a Mornay sauce, garnished with truffle pâté, brandy and a fried egg on top and Spam. One customer vigorously objects to Spam. Then, for no apparent reason, Vikings appear, chorusing in Welsh-choir formation an ear-worm theme (‘Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Lovely Spam, Wonderful Spam…’). Surreal and amusing. But how did we move from this silly sketch to a plethora of unwanted emails?
There is debate about the origins of this word for junk email. While many people claim that it can be traced directly to Monty Python, others point to the original word as inspiration. After the Second World War, Spam was immensely popular in the UK as well as its native USA, mostly owing to its cheapness and abundant supply. Spam was especially popular with the economically disadvantaged. In the 1960s it was often used as a synonym for cheap quality on account of its near-ubiquity, its homogeneity of taste and its low cost. The Monty Python sketch is amusing partly because it plays to these attributes.
Then along came bulletin board users in the 1980s with their Multi-User Domains (MUDs). It became a fad to repeat the word ‘Spam’ many times to crowd out or push other text off screen. In the embryonic period of AOL (America On-Line), users often quoted ad nauseam from the Monty Python sketch. In those days of slow response times, a whole lot of junk text would frustrate users, who described this practice as ‘spamming’. This unsociable behaviour became a form of bullying, whereby rival factions of fans could flood one another’s chat rooms with unwanted material, e.g. Star Wars aficionados bombarding Star Trek chat rooms. From there it’s only a short step to our contemporary notion of bulk junk-mail posting.
But then a strange thing happened to Spam. It strayed into the same linguistic space as the rhyme word ‘scam’. That yucky aspic taste and those chunks of pork took on the ham as in ham-actor connotation (a whole new digression there) whereby Nigerian princes and lottery winners and confected sob-stories became both spam and scam. In countries like Nigeria and Russia, where unemployment among computer graduates is high, a black market has developed in new versions of the snake-oil salesman that would put P T Barnum to shame.
Spam has even jumped out of computers into the flesh world, via the guerrilla marketing method known as ‘street spam’. Posters or fliers are pasted in streets, on construction sites, in laneways, on telephone poles, fences and motorway hoardings. This kind of spam is used by political parties, fringe lobby groups, concert promoters and retailers. Spam is all around us in the form of T-shirts and in wall-to-wall advertising on the clothing of sports stars. Turning on free-to-air TV, we can glide past entire channels devoted to nothing but ads: spam by another name. It’s as if that damn song never stops. Not content with the old Monty Python ditty, even Weird Al Yankovic has a spam song.
‘Oh, spam (spam), Ham and pork/ Think about nutrition, wonder what’s inside it now (oh boy)/ Spam (spam), It’s the best/ Really makes a darn good sandwich any way you slice it…’
And now we have a blog post dedicated to Spam. Too much. Need a salad.
Word Worry Will 