JargonFile/entries/mung.txt

mung

/muhng/ , vt. [in 1960 at MIT, Mash Until No Good ; sometime after that the
derivation from the recursive acronym Mung Until No Good became standard;
but see munge ] 1. To make changes to a file, esp. large-scale and
irrevocable changes. See BLT. 2. To destroy, usually accidentally,
occasionally maliciously. The system only mungs things maliciously; this is
a consequence of Finagle's Law. See scribble , mangle , trash , nuke.
Reports from Usenet suggest that the pronunciation /muhnj/ is now usual in
speech, but the spelling mung is still common in program comments (compare
the widespread confusion over the proper spelling of kluge ). 3. In the wake
of the spam epidemics of the 1990s, mung is now commonly used to describe
the act of modifying an email address in a sig block in a way that human
beings can readily reverse but that will fool an address harvester. Example:
johnNOSPAMsmith@isp.net. 4. The kind of beans the sprouts of which are used
in Chinese food. (That's their real name! Mung beans! Really!) Like many
early hacker terms, this one seems to have originated at TMRC ; it was
already in use there in 1958. Peter Samson (compiler of the original TMRC
lexicon) thinks it may originally have been onomatopoeic for the sound of a
relay spring (contact) being twanged. However, it is known that during the
World Wars, mung was U.S.: army slang for the ersatz creamed chipped beef
better known as SOS , and it seems quite likely that the word in fact goes
back to Scots-dialect munge. Charles Mackay's 1874 book Lost Beauties of the
English Language defined mung as follows: Preterite of ming, to ming or
mingle; when the substantive meaning of mingled food of bread, potatoes,
etc. thrown to poultry. In America, mung news is a common expression applied
to false news, but probably having its derivation from mingled (or mung)
news, in which the true and the false are so mixed up together that it is
impossible to distinguish one from another.