Re: SPAM???

In article<Pine.GSO.4.21.0001312323550.25779-100000@xena>, Ben Norwood
<bdn...@aber.ac.uk> writes:
>On Yesterday, Galarza & Heredero wrote:
>
>: Hi, can anybody explain me what SPAM means????
>
>Spiced Pork And haM
>^      ^    ^     ^
>|      |    |     |
>
>Originally the brand-name of a product still made by Hormel.
>The current usage, meaning "unsolicited commercial email" has a number
>of hotly contested origns:
>
>i) Possibly named because the effect of UCE is allegedly similar to
>what happens if you drop SPAM in a fan...
>
>ii) More plausible, from a Monty Python sketch. Two candidates are:
>- A bunch of Vikings who repeatedly chant 'SPAM'.
>- Or, a cafe whereby every dish on the menu includes SPAM.


 Erm, you have got what was clearly expressed at first all mixed
 up again.  

 The root meaning is Hormel's SPICED HAM (SpAm),  cheap nasty
 watered down pork in tins.  During wartime shortages or 1950s 
 austerity this rubbish was sometimes the only meat you could 
 get, and was served up in different guises at every meal.
 So too with misers and cheapskates into the 1960s.

 This is why the Monty Python sketch shows a sea-side landlady
 serving up a menu of endless cheap and nasty dishes with spam
 and this, spam spam and that, spam fritters and the other, etc.
 This sketch, one and the same sketch, periodically breaks into
 a TV commercial for spam with a choir of Vikings singing
 the spam jingle.   So the underlying is quite clear: "oh god,
 not that same cheap rubbish AGAIN" (you might compare it with
 how the expression "Sweet Fanny Adams" got the same meaning
 with reference to ship's corned beef, which humorous sailors
 christened after the notorious murder and dismemberment
 of a Portsmouth prostitute).


 The Internet is a medium where everyone can speak without
 sanction of central editing, everyone pays a cost of reading
 their selected material and invests their own energy into
 selecting it.   The kind of behaviour SPAM refers to is like that 
 of the evangelical loonie who shouts his bollocks in the crowded 
 street you must walk down, rather than posting up an invitation
 to come and hear him if you are interested. In particular it 
 means posting the same bloody message in lots and lots of newsgroups
 to which it has no conceivable relevance.  The specific technical
 definition amounts to 20 separate copies being posted in any one
 consecutive 45 days: from that point further posting becomes,
 and remains, cancellable until it is withdrawn and apologised for.

 The practice of bulk unsolicited identical mails also became known
 as "mail-spamming", but this term did not appear until
 late 1997/early 1998.


                                            |~/           |~/
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P |      Woof Woof, Glug Glug               ||____________||      0  | P
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L |<a href="news:alt.religion.scientology"></a>_____________|/_______| L
and<a href="http://www.xemu.demon.co.uk/clam/lynx/q0.html"></a>XemuSP4(:)

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