What a long, strange trip it�s been for the word spam. Moving from the trade name of a canned pork product to the derisive moniker for junk e-mail, spam has performed some lexical acrobatics in the past few decades.

Its life story began in 1936 when Hormel Foods Corporation offered a $100 prize to name their new canned meat product. Kenneth Diagneau, the brother of Hormel�s vice president, suggested the name Spam.

But here�s where the lexical trail grows a bit faint, because no one is certain if Diagneau formed Spam from the first and last letters of SPiced hAM, or if the SP part of the name is an abbreviation for Shoulder Pork. Either way, the name is known to linguists as a blend word, just as breakfast and lunch blended make brunch, and motor and hotel equal motel. With billions of cans of the stuff sold since 1937, Spam�s blended name enjoys global recognition.

SPAM II

Today there are two spams: the canned meat variety, and another synonymous with �junk e-mail.� It turns out that these two spams are related through an unlikely tangle of events.

First, there was the famous 1970 �Spam� sketch by Monty Python�s Flying Circus, the British comedy group. A couple enters a restaurant, where they are told by the waitress that the day�s menu consists of �spam egg spam spam bacon and spam� and dozens of other spam specialties. Meanwhile, an inexplicable chorus of helmeted Vikings in the background sings endless praises to �spam, spam, lovely spam.� Their operatic crescendos ultimately overwhelm all conversation.

Then, in the 1980s, in an electronic imitation of the repetitive Viking chorus, abusive computer message board users made it a habit to enter the word spam over and over into the computer to scroll other users� texts off the screen.

By the mid-1990s, the word spam was increasingly employed to refer to any excessive multiple posting on the Internet. The word has now settled into the cover term for the phenomenon of unsolicited e-mail advertisement.