All I Got Is a Little Spam

When Elijah asked the widow for some food, she threw up her hands in despair and said, “All I got is this here Spam.” 

Say the word “spam” to the folks in your congregation and they’re likely to immediately come up with two different definitions. The younger set will automatically envision e-mails from Nigerian bankers wanting to bestow a recently discovered trust fund in your name, or pharmacies wanting to enlarge certain parts of the anatomy. Boomers and Builders will dial their memories back, for good or ill, to a pink, gelatinous something in a can.

The origins of the connection between spam as computer junk mail and Spam the ubiquitous canned meat aren’t clear, but a couple of stories would seem to make sense. Some connect it to the famous Monty Python restaurant sketch in which the menu consists of such repetitious delicacies such as “spam spam spam egg and spam; spam spam spam spam spam spam baked beans spam spam spam.” Computer spam is just a similar menu of repetitive, tasteless junk. Others, though, trace the origin of the term to a computer lab at USC, where the students began to compare...