What the word Spam means and where it comes from
If you ask an Italian e-mail user what “spam” is, he or she will answer that it is junk.
The annoying habit of many companies, of sending e-mail advertisements to users who have not requested them. If you ask an Englishman the same question, he is also likely to think of a famous brand of canned meat manufactured by the Hormel Food Corporation. The product is famous as one of the few meats excluded from food rationing during World War II. His notoriety lasted even in the following years.
The first Spam in history
The first electronic message of unsolicited advertising was sent on May 3, 1978.
At that time, the Internet was still called Arpanet and had already been working for 9 years. It allowed many people involved in academia and government to exchange emails.
On May 3, a marketing official from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), a company in the “minicomputer” business, sent a message to all Arpanet users on the U.S. West Coast inviting them to discover a new product line.
The message created an uproar on the network because it violated commonly accepted rules of behavior: Arpanet was a research support tool. Its use was intended to be strictly noncommercial.
How many emails are Spam?
More than 2 billion people write 144 billion emails a day, 68% of which are spam. Half of the latter is related to pharmaceuticals.
Acronyms
The original source of the name Spam is “Shoulder of Pork AndhaM” (“shoulder of pork and ham”).
Other possible sources are “SPiced hAM” (“flavored ham”), “Spiced Pork and hAM” (“flavored pork and ham”), “Specially Processed Army Meat” (“specially manufactured meat for the army”) or “Specially Processed Assorted Meat” (“specially manufactured mixed meat”) for the light version that contains both pork and chicken.
The sketch that gives rise to the term Spam
The term Spam draws its origin from a famous sketch by the great Monty Python’s in Flying Circus that was broadcast by the BBC in the late 1960s early 1970s.
This sketch showed a married couple entering a restaurant and sitting next to a table of Vikings.
The waitress lists the dishes of the day, all of which are based on Spam (the famous canned meat): “eggs and spam,” “eggs bacon and spam,” “eggs bacon sausage and spam,” “spam eggs bacon and spam,” and so on, more and more insistently.
The woman does not want to eat spam at all and asks for dishes without it. But while insisting, he fails to succeed.
Whereupon the Vikings begin to chant SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, and the whole thing is fomented by the husband who instead loves SPAM meat.
Until the climax of the finale where the singing takes over everything, with a refrain that sounds something like this:
“SPAM SPAM SPAM.
SPAM SPAM SPAM
Lovely SPAM, wonderful SPAM!”
The skit is probably related precisely to the policy of wartime rationing of meat.
From this comic sketch here is the understanding of why spam has this name.
Watch the sketch in the original language
Watch the sketch in Italian language
