""I'd always been fascinated by eating at transport cafes, which is where the truck drivers eat," he recalled. "There was always a menu on a blackboard...and so when I wrote a sketch with Graham, about a menu at a transport cafe, which had increasing amounts of spam in it. And we just got very silly. We laughed and we wrote things like, as you know, egg spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, tomatoes, spam, spam and cheese.""
"Thanks to Cleese and his colleagues, what was once a vanilla acronym-UCE, or Unsolicited Commercial Electronic Mail-is today more colorfully known as "spam." Adopted by the Oxford English Dictionary in 1998 and the U.S. Congress and the Federal Trade Commission in their CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, the rebranding has its roots in a famously untethered 1970 episode of the British television series Monty Python's Flying Circus."
John Cleese will stop in San Jose on Sept. 14. Monty Python's 1970 sketch set in a transport café repeated the word "spam" alongside menu items and introduced Vikings chanting "spam, spam, spam, spam." The sketch transformed a bureaucratic acronym—UCE, or Unsolicited Commercial Electronic Mail—into the colloquial term "spam." The Oxford English Dictionary adopted "spam" in 1998, and the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 codified the term in U.S. law. Early software engineers embraced "spam" as a cultural reference. The Flying Circus also inspired Guido van Rossum to name the Python programming language, foundational to many modern tech platforms.
Read at Metro Silicon Valley | Silicon Valley's Leading Weekly
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