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Alternate meanings: mung bean, Multipurpose Unilateral Nonsense Generator

Mung (or munge) is computer jargon for "to make repeated changes which individually may be reversible, yet which ultimately result in an unintentional irreversible destruction of large portions of the original item." It was coined in 1958 at the Tech Model Railroad Club, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1960, the backronym "Mash Until No Good" was created to describe Mung, and a while after that it was revised to "Mung Until No Good"—making it one of the first recursive acronyms, and lived on as a recursive command in the editing language TECO.

Munging implies destruction -- to make large-scale and irrevocable changes to a file and to destroy it. Hence, in the early text-adventure game Zork, also known as Dungeon, the user could mung an object and thereby destroy it. (Making it impossible to finish the game if the object was an important item.) A person who vandalizes a Wiki page would not be munging that page because the changes could be reversed.

Origin of Mung

Mung may have been created from the Lowland Scots word 'munge', meaning to imperfectly transform or, later, to munch up into a mess.

Alternatively, according to Charles Mackay's book, Lost Beauties of the English Language, published in 1874, there was an early American term, "mung news," which meant "false news." This was because, according to Mackay, mung is an obsolete past participle of mingle, and so mung news was news that was so mingled it was impossible to determine what was true and what was not. This may be the origin of Mung.

Derivative and alternate meanings

Address munging is the obfuscation of e-mail addresses, which originated in response to the spam epidemics of the 1990s. The goal is to prevent automated e-mail address harvesting by spammers through the alteration of email addresses in a fashion that mungs them from a computer's perspective but not a person's.

In some circles 'mung' is used as a word meaning foul material covering on a surface. i.e. "you've got some mung in between your teeth" or "you left your mung on my table." Military mechanics loosely use the term to refer to a combination of axle grease, mud, and dead things that were crushed under the equipment, and anything else that is generally left to be sprayed off by the lowest ranking shop worker.

Wayne and Garth also noted that mung was the worst thing anybody can get in their halloween bag on Saturday Night Live's Wayne's World sketch.

This concept has spawned cast-offs, implying that anything that is supremely disgusting can be said to be "Mung".

Carrie Fisher, who played Princess Leia in the original Star Wars trilogy, has referred to the substance that oozed from the mouth of the Jabba the Hutt puppet (as seen in the film Return of the Jedi) as mung.

"Mung" was also the name of the main food eaten by the characters in the educational children's television show Cro.

The word "Mung" was used on the hit show South Park and was defined as "the stuff that comes out when you press down on a pregnant woman's stomach."

According to the urban dictionary (www.urbandictionary.com), "munging" includes the following: 1. a recently deceased corpse is disinterred, 2. one person places their mouth over the vagina or anus of the deceased, and 3. another person jumps on the corpse so that a combination of bodily liquids and embalming fluid flies into the mouth of the first person. That combination is referred to as "mung." (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=mung) This definition is supported also by the University of Pennsylvania Language Log (http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003233.html), which states: "to mung is to consume the bodily fluids of a corpse, preferably that of an old woman, and typically by direct mouth-on-orifice contact while a buddy jumps on the corpse's stomach. "

External links

• Munge at FOLDOC
• Ursine:Mung - Jargon File entry
• Email address munging is considered harmful

This article is based in part on one in the jargon file; the jargon file is in the public domain.

• Information technology management
• Internet terminology
• Sex moves