Despite the success of Wrigley’s, a gum whose brand name makes me think of worms in a rain storm, most marketing experts concur that a product cannot succeed with a bad name. A good name should be short and evocative, and should contain strong, explosive sounds like b and p. Spam has all these qualities: it is certainly short, it contains a p, and it evokes—perhaps unconsciously—its origin as an abbreviation of spiced ham. Spam began as a brand name in 1937, but by the 1940s it had also become attached to other items intended for a mass market: spam medal, for instance, became slang for a medal given indiscriminately to all members of a military unit. More recently, spam has become a cyberspace verb: if an unscrupulous business flouts Internet etiquette by indiscriminately posting unsolicited advertisements to hundreds of newsgroups, it has engaged in “spamming.”