Junk email is called 'spam' because of a Monty Python sketch.
Why it is true
Spam is an American brand of canned meat from 1937. In a 1970 sketch set in a café where every dish contains Spam, a group of Vikings keeps singing 'Spam, Spam, Spam' and drowns out the conversation. In the 1980s and 1990s, internet users adopted the word for repeated messages that flooded everything.
Source: Oxford English Dictionary
Would you rather be asked first?
This is the reading side of the site, so the answer is in the sentence above — that is the whole point of it. Test yourself works the other way round: the question comes on its own, and the fact and the explanation only appear once you have answered.
