"I Don't Like Spam!"

According to Wikipedia, the earliest point at which the term spam was used of unwanted email was sometime in the 1980s. Inspired by the Spam song as presented on the old Monty Python TV show, the term is a perfect designation for unwanted correspondence, especially one mass-blasted to its unsuspecting victims.

Of course, this phenomenon didn't begin with the Internet. If you're like me, each delivery day your snail mailbox is crammed with "junk mail," third class advertising. We didn't (and don't) call junk mail spam. (At least, I haven't heard anyone use the term for junk mail yet.) But it's spam, nonetheless.

All of which makes the latest usage of the term I've seen so interesting. One of the books I'm reading right now is Walter Isaacson's new biography of Albert Einstein. Isaacson speaks of the young Einstein's efforts to find a job just after completing his undergraduate work at the Zurich Polytechnic. He also mentions that shortly after graduating, Einstein published a paper which he later dismissed as inconsequential. But it was handy for the applicant to be published. Writes Isaacson:

...[Einstein] now had a printed article to attach to the job-seeking letters with which he was beginning to spam professors all over Europe. [italics added by me]

Now what so interests me about this is that Isaacson writes substantial books, weighty with research. (Yet accessible to general readership, of which I am definitely a member...I don't get physics at all!) In other words, Isaacson writes things that he hopes will do more than just sell today. He wants future audiences to read his studies of people like Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin, and Einstein. Isaacson must feel very confident not only that the term spam as unwanted correspondence will be around a long time, but that will also be applied to more than emails and other unwanted electronic intrusions.

He may be right to use the term in an ex post facto way to describe the pesty job seeking of an early-twentieth century college graduate. But it's always interesting to watch a word evolve.

And I can't help but wonder, will some future writer describe the Declaration of Independence and preceding petitions from the colonies that formed the United States as spam?

They were certainly unwanted and unsolicited by their recipients, Parliament and King George. Who knows? Some future film by that devotee [NOT] to historical accuracy, Oliver Stone, might show George III looking at the document penned by Thomas Jefferson and make his own declaration: I DON'T LIKE SPAM!

You never can tell how a word will evolve.

[THANKS TO: Joe Gandelman of The Moderate Voice for linking to this post.]