How a Tin of Ham Became Your Inbox

Spam has made a remarkable journey for a tin of processed pork. It started in a pantry, wandered into a comedy sketch, and ended up as the name for most of the email anyone has ever received. Along the way, it barely changed its meaning at all: from the beginning, it was something you got whether you wanted it or not.

Hormel launched the product in 1937. The name came out of a naming competition, reportedly won by an actor called Ken Daigneau, the brother of a Hormel executive, who took home a hundred dollars for his trouble. What the name actually stands for is a matter of some debate. “Spiced ham” is the popular explanation, but Hormel has always been coy about it, which is either a masterclass in brand mystique or a sign that nobody can quite remember.

What made Spam famous was the Second World War. It was cheap, it kept forever, and it could be shipped to soldiers and civilians in enormous quantities. In post-war Britain, under rationing, it was one of the few meats that seemed to be everywhere. A whole generation grew up having it whether they liked it or not, which is the important part of this story.

That’s the joke Monty Python picked up in December 1970. Their sketch is set in a greasy café where nearly every item on the menu comes with Spam, often several times over, and a customer who would like something without it has very little hope. Eventually a table of Vikings breaks into a song made almost entirely of the word, drowning out everyone else in the room.

If you’ve ever tried to have a conversation in an open-plan office, you’ll recognise the scenario.

The sketch might have stayed a piece of comedy history if it hadn’t been so popular with the people who built the early internet. In the 1980s, users of online text games and chat systems would sometimes flood a conversation by typing the same word over and over, and “spam” was the obvious choice, partly because of the Vikings and partly because it’s a very satisfying word to type repeatedly.

By the early 1990s, it had become the word for any message dumped on far too many people at once. In 1993, a piece of software went wrong on Usenet, the discussion forums of the day, and posted around two hundred messages to a single group. Someone called it spam, and it stuck. A year later, a pair of American immigration lawyers posted the same advertisement to thousands of Usenet groups, and spam became not just a nuisance but a business model.

Since then the word has done what successful words do. It has spread far beyond its origins, to junk email, fake reviews, automated comments and those calls about your car’s extended warranty, which, for the record, I don’t have.

What I like about it is how little the meaning has moved. The tin, the sketch and the inbox all share the same idea: something cheap, endlessly repeated, and very hard to avoid. Hormel, to its credit, has taken it fairly gracefully. It asks that the junk be written in lowercase, spam, so it isn’t confused with the brand, SPAM, in capitals. A company that can be that relaxed about its name becoming a synonym for unwanted email clearly understands something about language: once a word belongs to everyone, you can’t take it back. You can only ask people to mind the capitals.