Mung

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 created 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 few recursive acronyms.

Mung originally had two main meanings: to make large-scale and irrevocable changes to a file and to destroy something. A person who a Wiki page would not be munging that page because the changes could be reversed. 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.

The spam epidemics of the 1990s have created a new meaning for mung: to modify an e-mail address so that humans can readily reverse it but robots and address harvesters cannot.

Mung also sometimes stands for Multipurpose Unilateral Nonsense Generator, which is a program that will take web pages and run algorithms on them to make them read as if said in a dialectical manner. A web site that has MUNG filters (although it does not actually use MUNG, but Perl) can be found here.

Origin of Mung

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.

Alternately, Mung may have been created from the Scottish dialectical word munge, meaning to imperfectly transform or, later, to munch up into a mess.

Additionally, military mechanics loosely use the term to refer to a combination of axel grease, mud, 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.

Mung as Slang

Additionally, mung refers to a sexual act that has gained popularity in Internet newsforums. The act of mung is described as taking place between two individuals and a corpse. The act requires some putrification of the inner organs as one participant is said to push down on the chest, forcing liquids out of the anus, vagina, or penis and into the other participants mouth. This is generally followed by penetrative intercourse by both participants heightening the necrophilia.

This original translation has spawned cast-offs implying that anything that is supremely disgusting can be said to be 'Mung.'

See also