Spam spam spam spam. Lovely spam! Wonderful spam!

I hope SPAM doesn't come down on me for using one of their site's pictures. anyway, that's where the name came from.

ok, that's the canned SPAM. the etymology of spam as unsolicited email is as follows. also from the SPAM site, i too lazy to type my own

"You've probably seen, heard or even used the term "spamming" to refer to the act of sending unsolicited commercial email (UCE), or "spam" to refer to the UCE itself. Following is our position on the relationship between UCE and our trademark SPAM.

Use of the term "spam" was adopted as a result of the Monty Python skit in which our SPAM meat product was featured. In this skit, a group of Vikings sang a chorus of "spam, spam, spam . . . " in an increasing crescendo, drowning out other conversation. Hence, the analogy applied because UCE was drowning out normal discourse on the Internet."

and then they go on about how ONE DAY, ppl will first associate spam with UCE and not their product.. right.. either they have not updated their site for a while, or all that processed meat gives them delusions. here's their link

I regret to say that I've never seen that episode. a little googling revealed that it was in Series 2 episode 25. Here's a transcript of that sketch. I wonder when spam will become a thing we talk about in the past tense, you know, like how we talk about monty python's flying circus?