spam
The canned meat spam was introduced by Minnesota-based Hormel Foods Corporation in 1937. Officially, the origin of the name is a corporate secret, but it’s likely named after a contraction of an earlier Hormel canned meat product sold as “spiced ham”.
Spam turned out to have the right combination of qualities to be effective food aid, so large quantities were produced and distributed as part of the WW2 Lend-Lease Act. In particular, the UK was sent vast quantities of the food, exemplified by Margaret Thatcher pejoratively describing it as a “wartime delicacy”. Spam became a key ingredient in Hawaiian and Filipino cuisine during this time.
A generation later, in 1970 UK comedy troupe Monty Python referenced the phenomenon in an absurdist sketch set in a restaurant where all the menu items contained spam, often more than once. Here’s a menu photo from a 2014 theatrical production.
Monty Python was then a touchstone of nerd culture, so the spam sketch and its associated song lyrics sometimes showed up as trolly chat macros on Usenet and IRC in the 1980s. Two different related slang meanings eventually became codified on the internet: email spam, which is first named as such in 1993, and the verb spamming for repeatedly sending messages to fill up the chat buffer. Both meanings first appear in a print dictionary in 1998.
winter
The season winter predates English, which means it was first used some time before the year 400. I’ve been focusing on new or interesting words in these posts, but that’s not really representative of the set of words we use in practice. The plurality of words used in both English speech and writing are still old Germanic in origin, i.e. from before the year 400. Courtesy of this youtube video, here’s a Dutch sentence that you could render into English using only Germanic words:
De koude winter is nabij, een sneeuwstorm zal komen. Kom in mijn warme huis, mijn vriend. Welkom! Kom hier, zing en dans, eet en drink. Dat is mijn plan. We hebben water, bier, en melk vers van de koe. Oh, en warme soep!
For completeness, about 1000 years ago the four seasons in English would be called lengthen, summer, harvest, and winter. The holiday Lent is named after the season it took place in. In this particular case, winter is probably more than 2,000 years old and less than 3,000 years old, but that’s about as accurate as you can get that far before writing.
bye
The valediction bye is a shortening of goodbye, dating from around 1703. Goodbye, in turn, is a shortening of “God be with ye”, dating from around 1570. “God be with ye” was a common English valediction beginning around the 1370s. Some intermediate common short forms from earlier in the 1500s include “God be wy you”, “Godbwye”, and “God buy”, but similarity in use with “good day” and “good evening” eventually changed the first word to “good” in common use.
captcha
The term captcha was invented around 2000 by Luis von Ahn and Manuel Blum at CMU. Short for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”, the word described a technology that had been in use since 1997 to deter bots on the internet.
Frustratingly, Wiktionary lists a first usage date of 2000 but doesn’t have a citation, while Wikipedia claims 2003. The 2003 date is clearly too late since their 2003 paper cites a 2002 paper that uses “CAPTCHA” in its title. This 2002 ACM newsletter by its inventors is the earliest publication I can find so far. Blum’s publication history doesn’t include anything that looks promising earlier. I suspect they were using the term in 2000, which is where the commonly cited date comes from, but didn’t publish anything using it until 2002.
Anyway, here’s a captcha from 1997: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/Captcha.jpg
borked
The verb borked originates from the 1987 nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan. He was seen as an unacceptable candidate by the Democratic establishment, who coordinated an intensively negative PR campaign that led to Bork being the only Supreme Court nominee to be rejected by Senate vote in the last 50 years. The seat was instead filled the next year by Anthony Kennedy. As always, Wikipedia has more detail for those interested.
The verb appears in print even before Bork’s nomination was resolved, and gained a more specific association with computer failures in the 2000s, possibly additionally assisted by looking like a playful misspelling of “broken”/”broked” and the Muppets’ Swedish Chef’s “bork, bork, bork” catchphrase from 1975.