Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

I was listening to your episode (Zig-Zig and Shilly-Shally) where you discussed the etymology of "spam".

I figured since I actually saw this evolve over the years, I'd clarify at least one aspect of how this came about. In the beginning, as you say, there was the Monty Python skit. In the early 90s, I spent a lot of time in online communities like MOOs. Like you say, especially since so many of us were college students (the majority of the internet population at the time) we did a lot of quoting Monty Python, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, etc.

Part of the experience of MOOs was the ability people had to program special actions on their player or an object. One example of this was to program something to to actually say "spam spam spam spam spam" ad nauseam. After a few years of this, "spam" tended to become associated with volume of (useless) text, even before spam as e-mail came about. So it seemed natural that when mass commercial e-mail started to surface, it too became spam, and eventually became the primary meaning of "spam".