Two weeks ago a Spanish girl in my class raised her hand to ask me the meaning of “junk mail”. I didn't tell her that the first recorded use of this uncountable compound noun meaning "unwanted letters" - usually publicity material - was in 1954, by which time junk meaning "worthless stuff" had already been in use for about 600 years. But, thinking about the special file for worthless stuff in my Hotmail account, which still has the title Junk, I patiently explained by asking whether she had an e-mail account, whether all the e-mails she received were from people she knew, and if not, what those other e-mails that filled her inbox might be. I could almost see the light bulb illuminating above her head as her mist of confusion suddenly cleared:
“Aah: ...Espam!” she exclaimed.
“Yes,” I conceded, wearily, “Espam…”
And then a little sped-up film began to play in my head, tracing the brief but extraordinary life-story of this strange 4-letter word, tossed by the waves of destiny from its birth in an American food company in the 1930s, via a group of anarchic English comedians in 1970, to the e-mail inbox of a Spanish teenager in 2014. I thought today I’d slow down that film and show it to you.
Often etymologists struggle to trace the precise origin of words;
is virtually unique in that we can state with absolute certainty both the exact moment of its first use - 1937 – and the name of the man who invented it – Ken Daigneau. The brother of an executive at Minnesota-based food company George A. Hormel & Co., Daigneau won $100 in a competition to name the company’s new processed meat product, a concoction of pork, ham and potato starch that has been sold in tin cans all over the world ever since. The company claim that the true meaning of the name Spam is a secret known only to a select group of Hormel elders, but we can probably assume with some confidence that the name is connected with the ingredients Shoulder of Pork and hAM, or – as is more commonly believed – SPiced hAM.
Although very few of them win their creators prizes, new words are constantly entering the English language. Quite often they are words that, in acts of etymological vandalism, contrive to crash elements of existing words together to create a new meaning. This is not done in the carefully-structured, scrupulously logical way in which, for example, the German language will offer us Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung, as a snappy new word meaning “struggle to come to terms with the past”. No, English neologisms (new words) tend to be more allusive: a word meaning what Spam means might require fourteen syllables in German, but Mr. Daigneau knew that in English a couple of letters from each relevant ingredient would do the job just as well.
In Through the Looking Glass, the second of his 'Alice' books, Lewis Carroll defined this sort of fusion-style neologism as a “portmanteau word” (as it packs two meanings into one word, like a portmanteau – a large suitcase with two compartments): some of the portmanteau words Carroll invented for his mock-archaic nonsense poem Jabberwocky – for instance, chortle (= chuckle + snort) – have slipped easily into standard English.
Smog is a portmanteau word (smoke + fog), and what better term for a hotel for people who need a break in the middle of a long motor-car journey than motel? Other, more recent, portmanteau words, torture to the ears of the logically-minded etymologist, include infotainment (a media compromise between information and entertainment), gaydar (the gay person’s innate, radar-like ability to detect homosexuality in others) and, um, mankini (look it up on Google images, if you dare).
But let’s get back to spam: where, you may be asking, is the connection between tinned meat and junk mail? Well, it is to be found in a famous sketch by a group of six comedy writer-performers who, between 1969 and 1974, made four series of a hugely influential TV show called Monty Python’s Flying Circus. They were highly-educated men who found that what made them laugh the most was to combine apparently random intellectual references with mundane elements of popular culture and surreal flights of imaginative silliness. They have already been responsible for least one new addition to the Oxford English
Dictionary: pythonesque. This word – formed with the –esque suffix, meaning “similar to” or “in the style of” (as in “Picasso-esque”) is an adjective we use when the absurdity of a real-life situation reminds us of a Monty Python sketch.
In the “Spam” sketch, a couple arrive in a working-class cafe full of singing Vikings where the waitress recites a menu in which Spam is a seemingly inescapable element of every dish. (“Egg and Spam; Egg, Bacon and Spam; Egg, Bacon, Sausage and Spam; Spam, Bacon, Sausage and Spam; Spam, Egg, Spam, Spam, bacon and Spam…” and so on). The Vikings, at this point, strike up a rousing chorus of "Spam! Spam! Spam! Spam!") Go on – have a look for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bW4vEo1F4E.
The use of spam to mean junk mail can be traced back to 1993, when users of the computer network "Usenet", a precursor of the World Wide Web, apparently coined the term after the Usenet administrator accidentally posted the same message 200 times to a discussion group. This was a time when the internet was something of a specialist interest, and these specialists were, generally speaking, the sort of technophiles whom we lesser mortals like to stereotype as "geeks" or "nerds", who would eventually become responsible for most of the technology-related neologisms of the 21st century that we now use without a second thought. The popular image of computer-geeks is of a caste of highly intelligent, young, mostly male, people who enjoy the company of computers more than that of other human beings. This stereotyping (for the full picture, see the US sitcom The Big Bang Theory) may be unfair, but part of the profile of the typical geek is that he's a devoted Monty Python fan...
And so it seems that is that when our geek overlords needed to come up with a word to define that phenomenon of junk e-mail that seems to multiply and proliferate, impossible to get rid of, ubiquitous, insanely repetitive, like the 1,286 comments I’ve received on this blog that apparently want to tell me about Chinese soccer teams and NFL jerseys, there was only one possible choice…
"Spam! Spam! Spam! Spam! ..."
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