February 10, 2000

mung

I was watching South Park last week and they used the word mung. I don't know if the spelling is correct. I looked in an online dictionary, but I could only find an entry for mung bean. Are the writers making up this word mung?

No, it's true, the word mung does exist. It is a bit of slang that doesn't make it into most mainstream dictionaries, but it's certainly in the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang. Let's bring everyone into the loop on the details of this South Park episode. You will all just have to wonder of I can do this because I am a loyal viewer or just a fabulous fact-digger.

In this episode of South Park, our foul-mouthed friends participate in a world-wide recorder concert. Here the boys from Colorado meet people from foreign cultures, like New Yorkers. Name-calling ensues and the New Yorkers make fun of the South Park boys who don't understand their slang. The South Park boys plot their sweet revenge, making up a word (mung) so the New York kids will look dumb when they pretend to know it. When their nemeses arrive, the South Park boys say that they are "nothing but mung" (episode 3-17).

So, what is mung? It is pretty much any disgusting thing you want to name. A word of profoundly obscure origin (no one will even take a stab at it), mung first appeared on the scene in the 1940s: "Mung. That was the Academy's name for the food they ate" (Burns, Lucifer, 1948). Over the years, mung referred to any number of nasty things: pimples, the stuff that grows on your teeth if you never brush them, biohazard on the floor of a science lab. You get the idea.

In the 1960s, the verb mung made its first appearance, usually as mung up. This use can be general: "The sergeant major chewed me out for munging up my boots so badly" (Wilson, REMF, 1941), or computer-specific ". . .programs can mung up files if. . .they run amok" (Miller, Jargon, 1981). Mung in computer slang may also refer to making large changes to a file. Some computer sources define mung as 'Mash Until No Good', sometimes realized as the recursive acronym 'Mung Until No Good'. Munging refers to changing your e-mail address in an easily reversable formula to avoid spam.

The mung bean is a sprout-like vegetable from India. While not everyone is a fan of this healthy little legume, the name doesn't appear to be related.

So, getting back to South Park. The boys spring their trap on the New York kids and then reveal that mung is a made-up word. The joke is on the Colorado gang as the New Yorkers point out that their "made-up" word is real. The New Yorkers claim that mung is "the stuff that comes out when ya push down on a pregnant woman's stomach". We have to give those New York kids credit. This is one (but only one) of the many disgusting referents of mung. In the 1970s there was a column in Sex Newspapers called Mung. When asked why the column had this name, Peters, the editor, said, "If you'll remember the old high school gross contests. . .Mung was this stuff: 'You take a preganat lady gorilla. . .and you tie her by the heals upside-down from a branch, and you beat her on the belly with a board – and the stuff that comes out of her mouth, that's Mung'" (1970).

This meaning of mung doesn't have any recent citations. All specific meanings of mung seem to have faded so that people understand only 'filth' or sometimes 'crap' as in the 1994 use in Esquire "Don't allow the current level of censorious PC mung to rise above your zesty taste for fantasy." Of course, that was before our South Park friends brought up the pregnancy bit. Look for this meaning to make a comeback in a high school near you.

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