Ainsley in San Diego heard a coworker say that after some ambitious feedback on a spreadsheet, they’d need to munge the numbers and kludge a solution together. In computing circles, munge means to manipulate data—originally with a whiff of producing crud, rubbish, or unreliable output. The word began as 1940s student slang for filth or junk, then moved into computer use in the 1960s and 1970s; the spelling mung also turns up. Kludge is another engineer-friendly term: a jerry-rigged workaround, something that works even though it probably shouldn’t. It may trace back to a German word meaning clever. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “A “Kludge” Works but Shouldn’t; “Munge” Manipulates Data”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
This is Ainsley. I’m calling from San Diego.
Hi, Ainsley. Welcome.
What can we do for you?
Thank you. I have a question about a comment my coworker made the other week.
We were discussing a spreadsheet together, and after review, we received some ambitious feedback, and he made the comment that we would have to munch the numbers. And I had never heard that word before. And a couple sentences later, he then said, we will have to kludge it together. So in the span of a couple minutes, he had two unique words that he thinks are typical, normal, every day. So I was wondering if you had any feedback on the word munch to begin with.
Yeah. Do you want ambitious feedback? I like that expression, too. Does that mean vigorous feedback, like detailed feedback? It gave us some lofty goals to work towards.
I see. I like that. Lofty goals. What do you think he meant about munging the numbers?
Originally, I thought manipulate in maybe more of a negative context. But after talking it through a little more, it’s more of just seeing what we could do or figuring it out. Maybe manipulate, but not so maliciously manipulate. Just see what we can do with them.
That conforms with the way that I know the word to munge. And it’s almost always about data, frequently about numbers or things that you can put in tables and rows and columns, that sort of thing. It’s a real word. It’s not that common. It is in some dictionaries, not all of them. And it does mean to manipulate numbers and data. But its story is a little more interesting than that because it did used to be negative.
So I’m super interested that you thought that there was a negative quality to what he was suggesting, that somehow it was a little bit bad to be munging numbers. That is interesting to hear. But I know that he wouldn’t have anticipated that it would be taken negatively. The way that it sounded because of the expectations put on us, that it would require some behind-the-scenes work. So that’s why I took it that way.
So it first pops up in the 1940s, but in the 1940s it just means crud or junk or filth or rubbish. And it could be used in student context to talk about the bad food served at a cafeteria or some gunk that’s on your belongings after walking in the mud, that sort of thing. And it’s specifically marked in the slang dictionaries as being student slang.
And then over time, it moves. And once computers become a thing in the 1960s and 1970s, munge, sometimes spelled with an E, M-U-N-G-E, sometimes without, munge starts to be referred to to mess around with data in a way where sometimes you’re not certain about the results, where you may get trash or rubbish as a result of working with this data and running it through scripts or applying programs or formulas to it. And then the negative tone starts to fall away. And now pretty much if you munge data, it’s you take a set of numbers and you do things with them. You manipulate them so that they can serve another purpose or serve another master.
Okay. He has done a lot of work with engineers. So maybe that’s where he originally picked it up. That would make sense to me.
Yeah, absolutely. I would expect engineers and Unix longbeards and those sort of people would know the term to munge data. It’s common enough to be in some slang dictionaries and one or two mainstream dictionaries, but it’s not an everyday word, really.
Okay. That makes me feel a little bit better because I did a survey, and four out of five people have not heard of the word munch, at least in our office.
Oh, that’s okay. There we go. Yeah. And are you all young? Is it a young office?
It’s actually not very young, so it’s an older generation for the most part.
Yeah. And then the other word, just to dispense with that pretty quick, kludge is how it’s often said. Kludge is how it looks like it’s spelled, K-L-U-D-G-E, is also another one that kind of comes from the early days of the computing era. And it’s probably from a German word having to do with being smart or clever. But now a kludge is kind of a half-assed workaround or like a jerry-rigged solution or something that works but shouldn’t, that kind of thing.
Yeah, I’ve heard people talk about a kludgy solution too. There is the old joke, which isn’t true, that the origin of the word is. It’s the sound a piece of hardware makes when you drop it into the ocean because it doesn’t work.
Well, that makes sense then that it was used with munch because it sounds like together that then we’ll come up with something.
That’s right. Yeah, Ainsley, they’re definitely from the same era, the same sort of people would use those words.
Yeah, so good luck munging those numbers.
Thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you for your call. Thanks for calling. We really appreciate it. Take care. Bye.
I use kludge a lot, but I don’t, mung is a word I know but don’t really use.
And you say kludge rather than kludge.
Yeah, I say kludge. That’s how I learned it. But the dictionaries show that it’s often kludge, and kludge has a nicer sound to it, a slingier sound to me.
Yeah. Yeah. I like them both. But the kludge is like, you do these on your car where I’ve seen somebody’s antenna, radio antenna broke off.
Yeah. And so they took a drinking straw and inserted it into the metal part in the car and then inserted the antenna into that. And it doesn’t really connect, but it looks nice or nicer.
You can do a lot of cludging with duct tape, right?
Yeah, exactly.
