From ‘Scientist’ to ‘Spam,’ the Surprisingly Playful Origins of English Words

During the Sixteenth Congress, representative Felix Walker of Buncombe County, North Carolina, often said that he was "only talking for Buncombe." His earnestness amused his colleagues, who began to use it themselves.

"Talking for Buncombe" morphed into "talking Bunkum" and was shortened to bunk, a synonym for "nonsense." In 1923, William Woodward published a farcical takedown of American business practices as Bunk. A protagonist of Woodward's novel determined to "take the bunk out of things." He became a professional de-bunker.

Lewis Carroll and Dr Seuss have contributed many new words to the adult lexicon, such as snark, nerd, and grinch because they had an awareness of the fun-hunger surrounding readers.

In Seuss's book The Tooth Book, Pam the Clam craves "Pizza! Popcorn! Spam!" Spam owes its popularity to Monty Python's Flying Circus that features it in a skit involving Vikings who sit in a cafe singing "Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, lovely Spam, lovely Spam," making it impossible for anyone else to talk. Spam became the go-to term for online junk mail.

• "Software" began as an unserious programmers' antonym of "hardware."
• "Bluetooth" was a funny name for a wireless system. Bluetooth was a nickname of a tenth-century Scandinavian king with a tooth so decayed it looked blue.
• "Blog" is a contraction of "web log."
• Many other words that started as cyber slang are included in the Oxford English Dictionary - for example, "crowdsourcing."
• Jeff Howe introduced "wired" as a name for online consultation among larger groups.