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NEW TO THE INTERNET? Chances are that you've been blithely assuming, like most new users, that the hard part of "jacking into the net" is just getting online. Wrong. The hard part is understanding what you find there.

Sure, most of the Internet is in plain English . . . sort of. But that "sort of" covers a lot of territory - some of which is just new uses for old words, but all of which can prove mysterious to "newbies," a term often hung on net newcomers. So get out your notebooks, newbies, here's a few bits of net lingo you're going to need.

Many newcomers find that their first few days on the Internet feel remarkably like being submerged in alphabet soup. The Internet is awash in acronyms - which can be a little scary at first, but you'll find that most net acronyms are very helpful once you know what they mean. FAQ's, for instance, are just about the most helpful things a newbie could wish for - Frequently Asked Questions files that are maintained in nearly every area on the Internet, and that collectively take the place of the One Big Manual that the Internet lacks. Reading the FAQ file is your most important duty as a brand-new "netizen." Asking questions already answered in one of the FAQs is a mortal sin on the Internet, and if you do so, you may well find your e-mail box overflowing with an avalanche of strenuous suggestions to RTFM - Read The [expletive deleted] Manual.

Net acronyms also figure prominently in e-mail or chat forum shorthand. With a little practice, you'll be rattling off IMHO (In My Humble Opinion), OTOH (On The Other Hand) and AFAIK (As Far As I Know) like a "net.veteran," and perhaps even earning a hearty ROTFL (Rolling On The Floor Laughing) for your electronic repartee. Long-winded anecdotes, however, run the risk of earning the dreaded MEGO (My Eyes Glaze Over), so keep it short.

Some Internet acronyms have become so established that even many net.veterans are not aware that they started out as acronyms. A program known as Veronica, for instance, is a very popular search utility for finding things on the Internet. But probably less than 1 percent of Veronica users know that the name stands for Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-Wide Index of Computerized Archives. The rodent within Veronica, by the way, is another computer program known as Gopher, used to fetch files from far-away computer systems. The name Gopher itself is a classic bit of net humor, being both a pun on its function (it "goes for" files), as well as a plug for the football team at the University of Minnesota, where Gopher was developed.

Internet jargon composed of acronym soup and in-jokes like these may eventually become a thing of the past as the technology of the Internet develops over the next few years and a less colorful but more commonsense vocabulary emerges. Already the World Wide Web, with its "home pages" resembling magazine pages, has given us programs quite logically known as browsers to read them with and even electronic bookmarks so we don't lose our place. But most of the Internet today remains a wild and wooly frontier, with customs and a language of its own.

First stop for many newbies on the Internet are the electronic discussion groups called USENET "newsgroups," which work like old fashioned bulletin boards. Here you can "post" your contributions to ongoing discussions and debates on more than 10,000 subjects. (Of course, by the time you've finished "posting" to all 10,000 newsgroups, your children will have grown up and sued you for neglect, so most of us just pick a few groups to follow.) Don't worry if you're prone to stage fright - for the time being, you can just read along and not worry about actually posting anything.

In net lingo, readers who don't post are called lurkers, since no one else can tell that they're there. In fact, lurking isn't such a bad idea for newbies, especially since an ill-considered or clueless post can get you flamed, or subjected to a seemingly endless barrage of remarkably nasty responses.

Avoiding such flames is made more difficult for innocent newbies by the phenomenon called trolling (after anglers trolling for fish) wherein net.veterans post deliberately provocative or silly statements, hoping to trick a newbie into correcting them. The first time you take the bait on one of these trolls (and sooner or later you will, trust me), you'll feel a whole new level of empathy for those poor fish flopping around in an angler's net. I fell for such a troll myself - once - by attempting to correct the curiously persistent misspelling of "veracity" (as "voracity") in the alt.folklore.urban newsgroup. Curiously persistent my foot - it turned out that the regulars in this group always spell it voracity, hoping to hook a clueless newbie like me.

Such perils to the ego aside, USENET can be a very friendly place, and has given us some dandy new uses for some of our most treasured old words. One such word given a new lease on life by USENET has been known around the world for generations as an enduring symbol of the best of American culture. I am speaking, of course, of Spam.

In its original sense, Spam is a canned lunch meat invented by George Hormel & Co. in 1936. The name Spam stands for Spiced Ham, and the name was arrived at by means of a public contest. The winner, the fellow who actually coined the term Spam, won the princely sum of $ 100, which even today buys more Spam than any rational person is likely to want. Spam gained worldwide fame, if not universal favor, by the simple fact of often being the only meatlike thing available during the days of meat rationing during World War II. Spam's eerie ubiquity continued after the war and earned it a place in the hearts (and arteries) of America.

Then, in 1994, two lawyers (whose names I shall not mention here, lest I feed their voracious appetite for litigation) decided to advertise their services on the Internet. Rather than follow established procedures (called netiquette - what else?) for this sort of thing, they dumped their remarkably obnoxious little ads into nearly every USENET newsgroup on the Internet. The regular users of those groups were understandably outraged, and the resulting ruckus highlighted another use for "spam" - as an Internet slang term (to spam) meaning to dump unwanted and irrelevant junk all over the place. The lawyers' little escapade wasn't the first such spam to hit the Internet (when's the last time you heard of a lawyer actually inventing anything?), but the howl that arose from net users in this case was loud enough to catapult this new meaning of spam into the media spotlight.

Most of the mainstream news organizations were mystified by this new incarnation of spam, but nonetheless dutifully spun a number of highly dubious theories as to the possible origin of the term. My favorite media explanation traced spamming to the hypothetical, but probably dramatically unpleasant, results of tossing real Spam into a rotating electric fan. (If some hapless reporter on the technology beat actually tried to demonstrate this theory in a newsroom somewhere, I'm sorry I missed it. Aren't you?)

In any case, the true source of this new sense of spam is no mystery to any Monty Python fan. The troupe's famous Spam sketch involves a couple who discover that the restaurant they've chosen doesn't serve anything not containing Spam (Wife: "Have you got anything without Spam?" Waitress: "Well, there's Spam, egg, sausage and Spam. That's not got much Spam in it.").

Perhaps the new verb "to spam" isn't quite fair to poor old Spam, but it perfectly describes the incident - USENET became temporarily unreadable for those of us without an appetite for spam. Fortunately, some clever fellow in Norway quickly deployed an automated computer program called a cancelbot on the Internet and all the lawyers' ads were erased, so the forces of goodness and light won that one. On the down side, the lawyers responsible for the "spamming" incident have since gone on to write a book on "Advertising on the Internet," so the Age of Spam may just now be dawning.