mung
/muhng/ alt. `munge' /muhnj/ [in 1960 at MIT, `Mash
Until No Good'; sometime after that the derivation from the
{recursive acronym} `Mung Until No Good' became standard] vt.
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. The kind of beans of which the sprouts 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 TMRC lexicon) thinks it may originally have been
onomatopoeic for the sound of a relay spring (contact) being
twanged.
