In 1937, an Austin, Minn.-based company called Hormel Foods held a contest. Hormel's Spiced Ham, it seems, needed a new name — something "as distinctive as the taste," the company's official history goes. The winner was one Kenneth Daigneau, a Broadway actor and, ahem, brother to a Hormel executive. He took home $100 and gave the world Spam.

Sixty years later, Hormel was trying to prevent the name of its product from leaking into the popular lexicon as a label for, of all things, electronic junk mail. In a 1997 letter, Hormel demanded that Sanford Wallace, who ran a huge bulk e-mailing business under domain names like spamford.com and spamford.net, "cease and desist from all further use of the trademark Spam."

"You can more responsibly refer to your business as bulk e-mail or by similar longstanding terminology," the letter said.

The spammer was unmoved. "If your client objects to the use of `spam' to refer to my client's business," Mr. Wallace's lawyers responded, "it's far too late to change the vocabulary of 25 million Internet users."

Today, spamford.net and spamford.com are gone, but the lawyers were right. The term — like junk e-mail — is everywhere, including on the lips of legislators. In the last two months, three separate anti-spam bills, including the RID Spam Act submitted two weeks ago, have been introduced in Congress.

So how did Mr. Daigneau's catchy contest-winning name, six decades later, come to be invoked in Congress?

The haphazard, organic spread of the Internet makes it difficult to trace things precisely. As early electronic bulletin board systems and chat networks merged and overlapped, their cliquish slang mingled along the way, creating a lexicon that the mainstream now takes as rote. Some creative sorts have suggested that Internet spam is actually an acronym, for something like Simultaneous Posting and Mailing, or, with more of a wink, Send Phenomenal Amounts of Mail. But most Internet folklorists point to Monty Python.

"First of all, people actually like the word," said Brad Templeton, the chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the author of an etymology of the word (templetons.com/brad/spam). "It's one of those funny-sounding words that people like to say."

Which is probably why the comedy writers of Monty Python created a TV sketch in 1970 that hinged on repetition of the word: "What you got?" a restaurant customer asks.

"Well," the waitress responds, "there's egg and bacon; egg, sausage and bacon; egg and Spam; egg, bacon and Spam; egg, bacon, sausage and Spam; Spam, bacon, sausage and Spam; Spam, egg, Spam, Spam" and so forth.

At a nearby table, a group of Vikings begin singing, "Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, lovely Spam, lovely Spam," drowning out all other conversation.

By the mid- to late 1980's, the fan base of Monty Python and those who frequented emerging chat networks called MUDs (for multi-user dungeons) had sufficiently merged. "We're not talking about people who were out kayaking in their free time," said Joel K. Furr, one of those early non-kayakers and now a technical trainer for the IDX Systems Corporation in Vermont. The poetic leap from the Nordic incantations in the Python sketch to any number of chat-network anomalies in which floods of data — sometimes deliberately sent, sometimes not — would stifle conversation, was just waiting to be made.

By most accounts, including Mr. Templeton's, Mr. Furr first brought the term from MUDs to the bulletin board system called Usenet. He was responding to the inadvertent repeated posting of a message to a Usenet newsgroup. That was in 1993.

Inadvertent mass postings gave way to deliberate flooding — "The first problem users we had were not commercial users," Mr. Furr said. "They were idiots." But marketers, realizing that there were potential consumers on these systems, quickly followed the idiots.

The word spam continued to follow them — from Usenet to e-mail to any of the millions of unsolicited scams and pitches that have now fueled federal action.

As for Hormel, it now makes just a few requests. According to a statement on www.spam.com, the company still objects to any reference to its product in association with junk e-mail. It also asks that references to its food be written in capital letters, to distinguish it from the e-mail.

And what do makers of Spam think of spam?

We oppose the act of "spamming," the statement says.