The word ‘spam’ for unwanted email comes from a 1970 Monty Python sketch set in a diner where every dish contained Spam — Spam and eggs, Spam and bacon, Spam and sausage — while Vikings at a nearby table chanted the name over and over, a joke internet users borrowed 20 years later

On the evening of Tuesday, 15 December 1970, at approximately 10:00 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time, the BBC1 television network in the United Kingdom broadcast the twenty-fifth episode of the surrealist British comedy series Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which had premiered on the same network approximately fourteen months earlier and had, across the intervening period, established the six-member comedy troupe of Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin as substantially the most consequential single British comedy institution of the immediate post-war television era. The final sketch of the December 1970 episode, written by Jones and Palin and running approximately three and a half minutes, was set in a fictional English greasy-spoon café called the Green Midget Café in the London suburb of Bromley, featured Terry Jones in drag as the café’s waitress reading out a menu in which the specific canned pork shoulder product manufactured by the Hormel Foods Corporation of Austin, Minnesota appeared in essentially every listed dish, and included a chorus of horned-helmeted Viking patrons in the corner of the café who systematically chanted the specific name of the same canned pork product at increasing volumes until essentially every attempt at ordinary conversation in the café was substantially drowned out. The sketch was titled, in the specific end credits that followed the broadcast, “Spam.” Approximately 23 years later, in the specific interval between 1993 and 1994, the same word — as a specifically lowercase common noun rather than as the trademarked capitalised proper noun of the Hormel canned meat product — would come to describe the substantial category of unsolicited bulk electronic mail that would, across the subsequent 30 years of commercial internet development, come to constitute approximately 90 percent of all email traffic sent worldwide.

The specific mechanism by which a three-and-a-half-minute British television comedy sketch about canned pork became the standard global English-language term for unsolicited commercial email is one of the more substantial single documented cases of specific cultural transmission from broadcast entertainment to technical vocabulary in the recorded history of the modern English language. The sketch itself had, in its original 1970 broadcast context, a substantially specific cultural resonance that essentially every subsequent international audience has substantially failed to fully appreciate. As detailed in the Monty Python Fandom archive’s institutional documentation of the specific “Spam” sketch and its production history, the Spam product that Hormel had introduced to the American consumer market in 1937 had, in the specific 1941-1945 wartime economic context of the Second World War, been shipped to Britain in substantial volumes under the Lend-Lease Act as one of the few meat products not subject to the substantial British wartime food-rationing restrictions. British consumers had, across the subsequent postwar period of continued rationing (which persisted until 1954), eaten substantial quantities of Spam because it was one of the few meat products consistently available. By the specific 1970 date of the Monty Python sketch, the British consuming public had progressively developed a substantial collective fatigue with the specific canned pork product that the sketch’s core comedic premise — a café menu in which essentially every dish contained Spam — was specifically designed to satirise. The sketch’s Viking chant of “Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam” (parodying Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s “Viking Song” of 1911) was uttered approximately 132 times across the sketch’s three and a half minutes. Mrs. Bun, played by Graham Chapman in drag, complained specifically that she did not like Spam. Her complaints were drowned out by the Viking chorus.

The specific translation of the Monty Python “Spam” sketch from British television comedy into modern computing vocabulary occurred progressively across the specific decade between approximately 1983 and 1993. Per EmailCloud’s detailed timeline reconstruction of the specific historical transition of “spam” from Monty Python reference to internet standard vocabulary, the earliest documented uses of “spam” as a verb applied to computer network activity appeared in the early-1980s user communities of Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) — the text-based multiplayer computer games that constituted the substantially most active social platforms of the pre-World-Wide-Web internet era. Users of these systems who wished to disrupt other users’ chat sessions had developed the specific practice of typing the same repeated text into shared chat channels at high volume, effectively drowning out ordinary conversation in essentially the same manner as the Monty Python Vikings had drowned out the Green Midget Café’s ordinary customer conversations. The specific cultural reference the early MUD users made to describe this practice was, by essentially all available documentary evidence, direct: users would explicitly type the Monty Python “Spam, Spam, Spam” chant as their disruptive text. The subsequent extension of “spamming” from chat-channel disruption to unsolicited email occurred substantially between 1990 and 1994, culminating in the specific 12 April 1994 incident in which the American immigration lawyers Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel posted a commercial advertisement for their firm’s green-card-lottery services to approximately 6,000 Usenet discussion groups simultaneously — the specific single event that essentially every subsequent history of commercial email spam credits as the origin of the specific bulk-commercial-email spam industry that would, across the subsequent 30 years, come to dominate global electronic mail traffic.

What Hormel actually did about it

The substantive corporate response of the Hormel Foods Corporation to the specific 1990s repurposing of its trademarked product name as the standard English-language term for unsolicited commercial email was, in essence, substantially pragmatic. As reported in Brett Rutledge’s linguistic analysis of the specific Monty Python-to-internet transmission of the “spam” terminology, Hormel’s substantial legal department initially considered pursuing trademark-infringement litigation against the specific commercial email marketing firms that were, in the mid-1990s, beginning to describe their own bulk email products as “spam” in trade publications and corporate marketing materials. The specific legal analysis Hormel’s counsel eventually delivered was that the term had entered the English common vocabulary through the specific 1970 Monty Python broadcast (which had itself been protected under the specific fair-dealing provisions of the United Kingdom’s Copyright, Designs and Patents Act) and the subsequent 20 years of organic user adoption in the online technical communities, meaning that any specific attempt by Hormel to reassert trademark control over the term would be unlikely to succeed and would substantially damage Hormel’s corporate reputation in the specific technical and creative-industry markets that had adopted the term.

The specific corporate compromise Hormel subsequently adopted was to formalise a specific typographical distinction between the two current meanings of the same word: the specific canned pork product would henceforth be marketed under the substantially all-capitals brand name “SPAM,” while the specific category of unsolicited bulk electronic mail would be referred to (in Hormel’s own subsequent official corporate communications) using the lowercase common-noun form “spam.” Per the Today I Found Out summary of the specific Monty Python-to-internet transmission of the “spam” terminology and Hormel’s subsequent corporate response, the specific practical effect of Hormel’s typographical compromise has been substantially uneven — the substantial majority of English-language published writing about junk email does not, in current practice, systematically distinguish between “SPAM” and “spam” in the specific manner Hormel’s corporate communications department has requested. Hormel itself has, across the subsequent 30 years of accumulated cultural association with the Monty Python sketch, essentially embraced the specific connection: the company sponsored a specific commemorative “Spam” can for the 2005 Broadway premiere of Eric Idle’s Monty Python-derived musical Spamalot, the Hormel Foods corporate Spam Museum in Austin, Minnesota conducts daily reenactments of the specific 1970 Monty Python sketch by local actors as part of the museum’s standard tourist programme, and the specific 2007 corporate advertising campaign celebrating Spam’s 70th anniversary directly referenced the Monty Python sketch on the product’s cans — although the specific advertising copy incorrectly dated the sketch to 1971 rather than the actual 1970 broadcast, in one of the more substantial single documented cases of corporate historical inaccuracy about a specific cultural reference that the same corporation had, by the specific date of the incorrect advertising copy, been commercially exploiting for more than three decades.