munchkin /muhnch'kin/ n.
[from the squeaky-voiced little people in L. Frank Baum's "The
Wizard of Oz"] A teenage-or-younger micro enthusiast hacking
BASIC or something else equally constricted. A term of mild
derision -- munchkins are annoying but some grow up to be hackers
after passing through a larval
stage. The term urchin is
also used. See also wannabee,
bitty box.
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mundane n.
[from SF fandom] 1. A person who is not in science fiction
fandom. 2. A person who is not in the computer industry. In this
sense, most often an adjectival modifier as in "in my mundane
life...." See also Real
World, muggle.
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mung /muhng/ vt.
[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. 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.
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munge /muhnj/ vt.
1. [derogatory] To imperfectly transform information. 2. A
comprehensive rewrite of a routine, data structure or the whole
program. 3. To modify data in some way the speaker doesn't need
to go into right now or cannot describe succinctly (compare mumble). 4. To add spamblock to an email address.
This term is often confused with mung, which probably was derived from it.
However, it also appears the word `munge' was in common use in
Scotland in the 1940s, and in Yorkshire in the 1950s, as a verb,
meaning to munch up into a masticated mess, and as a noun,
meaning the result of munging something up (the parallel with the
kluge/kludge pair is amusing). The OED reports
`munge' as an archaic verb nmeaning "to wipe (a person's
nose)".
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Murphy's Law prov.
The correct, original Murphy's Law reads: "If there
are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can
result in a catastrophe, then someone will do it." This is a
principle of defensive design, cited here because it is usually
given in mutant forms less descriptive of the challenges of
design for lusers. For example, you
don't make a two-pin plug symmetrical and then label it `THIS WAY
UP'; if it matters which way it is plugged in, then you make the
design asymmetrical (see also the anecdote under magic smoke).
Edward A. Murphy, Jr. was one of the engineers on the
rocket-sled experiments that were done by the U.S. Air Force in
1949 to test human acceleration tolerances (USAF project MX981).
One experiment involved a set of 16 accelerometers mounted to
different parts of the subject's body. There were two ways each
sensor could be glued to its mount, and somebody methodically
installed all 16 the wrong way around. Murphy then made the
original form of his pronouncement, which the test subject (Major
John Paul Stapp) quoted at a news conference a few days
later.
Within months `Murphy's Law' had spread to various technical
cultures connected to aerospace engineering. Before too many
years had gone by variants had passed into the popular
imagination, changing as they went. Most of these are variants on
"Anything that can go wrong, will"; this is correctly referred to
as Finagle's Law. The
memetic drift apparent in these mutants clearly demonstrates
Murphy's Law acting on itself!