[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: [email protected].
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."
[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {backronym}{clobber}{clone}{geef}{gunch}{manged}{mangle}{munch}{munge}{recursive acronym}{scribble}{smash the stack}{TMRC}{trash}]