My word of the day is spam. As in, “I didn’t find out a dear friend of mine was engaged because her e-mail letting me know got caught up in the !@#&^%* university spam filter.”
Spam actually has three definitions in M-W, the trademark, the noun, and the verb.
The noun and verb both take their origin from the 1970′s Monty Python skit, which starts out describing the menu of a restaurant with a rather limited ingredients list and then devolves rather wonderfully into a skit where Vikings just nonsensically start chanting spam.
Spam the trademark, is of course, the processed meat. It gets its name from…are you ready for this?…Shoulder of Pork and Ham.
It’s actually near and dear to my heart, even if it’s pretty frowned upon by the rest of the world. Spam draws together the two states closest to my heart: Hawaii and Minnesota. Made in Austin, consumed in Honolulu.
Spam’s popular in Hawaii thanks to U.S. occupation, because they used to give it to GI’s, since the didn’t have fresh meat. I say “occupation” without judgment, by the way — my parents both grew up in Japan on American bases, hence why we like it so much. In fact, it’s just like any other meat in Hawaii and it’s served in restaurants and in the local foodstuff, the Spam musubi.
It’s also a staple of our family breakfasts — I probably eat Spam at least once a week. I didn’t even know it was weird for us to eat it until late in elementary school and I’ve been defensive about it ever since. Once, in college, someone (I don’t remember who) told me Hawaiians like Spam because it tastes like human flesh; I summarily took him down. He shouldn’t have messed with a Hawaiian-Minnesotan on the subject of spam.
Actually, he really could have benefited from a trip or two to snopes.com. I bet he was the kind of person who falls for the other kind of spam.
