Subject: Bogus etymology: "Bug" and "Spam"
John Taber commented:
>Sender: "John K. Taber"
>Subject: Re: CM> Origins of the word "software" & "bug."
About the perils of poor scholarship in the etymology of the term bug and
that a reasonable explanation may be misleading.
A similar incidence is the term "Spam"
I first became familiar with the term in the late 80's (revealing my youth here)
as used on Usenet groups that were dealing with continual phenomenal growth
and accomodating "newbies" who didn't understand "netiquette".
There the term "Spam" was used to describe the action of a less than
courteous poster who blasted a message (often long) to many newsgroups. The
message were often off-topic as well. This is perhaps best represented by
the more recent spam wars with Cantor and Siegal offering Green Card on
every newsgroup.
In terms of the origin of the term "Spam" I had always assumed that it was
derived from the widely popular Viking Spam skit from Monty Python. It made
sense to me since the couple in the cafe could not hold a conversation over
the din of vikings yelling and singing "sam, spam, spam, spam". It seems
quite analogous to the problem of having intelligent conversation on a
newsgroup when there is a mass of unrelated trash to wade through.
Moreover, there seems to be a large overlap between Python fans and
computer-folk.
As I said, I assumed this was the meaning, although it's use certainly
pre-dates my awareness of this subculture.
However, the humourous part is that people even newer to the net than
myself have taken it upon themselves to often write histories or
explanations without any real knowledge about the topic and without any
humility about their lack of knowledge. Their explanations of the roots of
terms and customs are often very funny.
I think it was an airline magazine that started carrying articles about
computers and the net where an author proceeded to explain to the reader
the meaning of "spamming" pretty accurately, and then explained that its
origin was that it is analogous to throwing a chunk of spam at a fan. It
goes everywhere and gets all over everything. I really chuckled because I
am famous for mixnig metaphors myself. It's not spam that hit the fan, it's
a term that surfwatch filters out.
The etymology of such words is interesting in and of itself, but it is,
IMO, a useful way to understand this subsculture. We've already talked
about bug, software, surfing, and smilies (or emoticons). Other terms that
might be useful to comment upon are:
grepping
bot-posting/cancel-bots
kibo
foo and bar as generic variable/function names
Gnu (was Stallman the first? did he listen to the Smother's brothers?)
trolling
lurking
and of course a history of the growth of abbreviations (IMO,RTFM,YKYHB***,...)
The lesson for us all here, however, is that we should be careful in
commenting on our community history to separate the different levels of
confidence we place in the accounts posted here. We should note which
sources are primary and which are secondary, etc. Otherwise, this collected
memory will be much less useful because we may make it difficult to
separate fact from poor memories. Let's try to write history, not create
urban myths.
-john .w cobb
______________________________________________________________________
Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
Moderator: Community Memory
http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
From cobbjw@ornl.govSun Jun 23 15:16:53 1996
Date: Fri, 14 Jun 1996 14:01:57 -0700
From: "John W. Cobb"
Reply to: cpsr-history@Sunnyside.COM
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org"