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