Transcripts

Steven Pinker:
A Python skit from the early 70's in which a couple asks a waitress what's on the menu and she says, "Well we have eggs and Spam, eggs, bacon, and Spam, eggs, sausage, bacon, and Spam, eggs, Spam, sausage, Spam, Spam, bacon, Spam, eggs and Spam, Spam, spinach and Spam."

Steven Pinker, author of the book The Stuff of Thought…

The mindless repetition of the word Spam reminded some hacker in the late 80's of the mindless repetition of email messages. And so he started to use the verb "to Spam" meaning to repeat something in the manner of the Monty Python waitress and it caught on.

Steven says words often come into the language in quirky ways like this and yet there are things in our world for which there is no word.

There's some concepts for example where it would be very handy to have a word but nothing has caught on like: unmarried heterosexual partners. How do you introduce the woman that you're living with who isn't your wife or the man who isn't your husband? If you say, "It's my girlfriend", that sounds a little frivolous if you're fifty years old, for example you've been living together for twenty-five years. Or the word for the first decade of this century - we're eighty percent through it and we still don't know what to call this decade. When a word does come in, it's often unpredictable what word it will be.

At somethingyoushouldknow.net I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know.