June 07, 2006

Mung gets munged


Following up on my suggestion in a post yesterday of a term mungagnia, an addiction to recursion, possibly sexual, my learned friend Jason Kerwin pointed out to me that the internet generation has developed an extreme specialization of the term mung, a specialization which takes it in a new and disgusting direction. To these youngsters, to mung is to consume the bodily fluids of a corpse, preferably that of an old woman, and typically by direct mouth-on-orifice contact while a buddy jumps on the corpse's stomach. In the interest of good taste, and because it suggests a physically unlikely universe in which time can loop, I will *not* propose the natural recursive extension of the innovation, i.e.

Mung The munging of the corpse of a person that died as a result of mung-induced illness, etcetera, ad infinitum.

I must, however, make sense of the above non-proposal by noting that in the disgusting (but non-recursive) sense there is a corresponding noun mung refering to the piquant smoothie prepared by munging, presumably a mass term. It is the analogous (recursive) noun that you find in the compound mung-induced illness. I never came across the original recursive acronym mung (Mung Until No Good, a development of Mash Until No Good) being used as a nominal, perhaps because the product of munging was typically so much more abstract, e.g. a computer program, and correspondingly less, uh, visceral.

Posted by David Beaver at June 7, 2006 12:35 PM