It occurred to me in the middle of the night to wonder how SPAM felt about spam so I checked. At first I thought that the official SPAM website was not even going to mention it which I thought was terribly odd. But then I found a page they call SPAM and the Internet.

Inspired by beer in cans, the Hormel Foods Corporation puts ham in a can in 1937 – during the second World War – and calls it SPAM (SPicy hAM). As it turns out the company was evidently prohibited from calling the food ham because it was made out of pork shoulders and not hindquarters.

Not wanting to call it Nearly Ham in a Can, Hamalike, I Can’t Believe It’s Not Ham, or Proletarian Pork, the company’s owner, George A. Hormel – a man sharp enough to sell ham in a can but presumably too dull to come up with “SPAM” – had a cocktail party where he asked his country club friends to name the new product which was nearly but not quite ham. He paid the winner, Kenneth Daigneau, $100 for the name SPAM. It’s unclear whether Mr. Daigneau ever tried the product.

And SPAM, the food, made out very well for quite a while. There is no evidence that it was mocked or maligned for years.

In 1987, Monty Python did a skit where a restaurant served everything with SPAM and everybody said SPAM repeatedly and then a group of Vikings, who had stopped by for a spot of lunch, sang a SPAM song.

The word quickly began to take on the meaning of a repeated annoyance. Which can’t be good for the Hormel Food Corporation. As it turns out, Hormel does have something to say about spam. And this is it: “We do object to the use of the word “spam” as a trademark and to the use of our product image in association with that term. Also, if the term is to be used, it should be used in all lower-case letters to distinguish it from our trademark SPAM, which should be used with all uppercase letters.” You will notice I have used SPAM in all caps very carefully. I don’t want to get sued.

Somewhat too diplomatically, Hormel Food Corporation also adds: “This slang term, which generically describes UCE, does not affect the strength of our trademark SPAM.” They site such examples as Star Wars, a US military objective, and Cadillac, used to describe something classy. Not nearly the same thing.

Finally the Hormel Food Corporation declares its position like this: “Ultimately, we are trying to avoid the day when the consuming public asks, ‘Why would Hormel Foods name its product after junk e-mail’”

Meanwhile, Spam-blockers and anti-spam software cannot register their trademark so long as it contains the word “spam”.

Perhaps to protect the integrity of their fine product, the Hormel Food Corporation might consider renaming their product. While continuing to use “Spicy Ham” as an influence, I humbly submit “Sham.”

SS