I open my overcoat and flap it to see if the ming is as steadily rancid as I imagine it to be.
Irvine Welsh: Filth
The word ming means very different things to different people. To the Chinese, 命(ming) means ‘destiny, fate; luck’ and elicits associations with the Ming Dynasty, officially the Great Ming, which ruled China from 1368 – 1644, re-establishing the hegemony of the Han people, the largest ethnic group in China; to antiquarians, ming evokes the vivid blues and greens of the porcelain produced in the Ming era; to fans of the comic strip, TV series and classic film Flash Gordon, it brings back memories of archvillain Ming the Merciless, ruthless ruler of the planet Mongo (complete with 20th-century Yellow Peril racial stereotyping), or even former Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies or the ex-leader of the Liberal Democrats Menzies Campbell, both of whom were given the tongue-in-cheek nickname Ming the Merciless due to the Scottish pronunciation of their name; to the denizens of rural Lincolnshire, land in ming was land in mixed ownership and to those of us who spend time near the rarefied microclimate of a soap-dodging partner who ‘mings like Tyrone’, it conjures up a miasmatic menu of its very own. (Apologies to Aston Villa and England defender Tyrone Mings, who must have spent his whole childhood enduring such witticisms – I think it might be safe to assume he isn’t going to read this, however [although marginally more likely than my girlfriend is to do so]. And Villa thrashed Newcastle last weekend, so he can do one anyway. Etymologists think that the Mings surname might be a shortened form of a Breton forename, Menguy, which was introduced to Britain following the Norman Conquest, or it could perhaps mean ‘son of Min’, rather than an epithet describing rank ancestors, but nobody seems very sure.)
Ming first appears as mengan ‘mix, blend’ in early Old English, descended from Proto-Germanic *mangijana ‘mix’, which is also the source of Modern German and Modern Dutch mengan ‘mix’. The picture is confused, though, because of the existence of the alternative (usually obsolete or dialectal) forms mang, meng, mong and mung, all of which have separate listings in the OED, producing a mingle-mangle ‘hotchpotch, mishmash’ of closely-related, cross-pollinating offspring. These *mangijana descendants have a plethora of different meanings, but the common thread is the idea of disparate elements that have been thrown together. Senses include ‘cause to associate’, ‘engage in battle’, ‘join in marriage’, ‘knead dough’, ‘crowd, rabble’, ‘chorus of sound’, ‘stir up, disturb, provoke’ and ‘jumble, confusion, mess’. 19th-century US English also had mung news ‘contradictory, false or misleading news’ – the ‘fake news’ of the 1800s. There are also several agricultural mangs, mings and mungs with senses such as ‘bring animals together to mate’, ‘acquire a mixed colour’ or ‘turn yellow’ (for corn) and ‘mixture of different kinds of grain or pulses’. Middle English has beanmung and peasemung, which were used to feed livestock and poultry, and you can still find mongcorn or mancorn ‘mixture of grains (usually wheat and rye) sown together’. Despite appearances, mung beans are not from this root but take their name from the Hindi word for Vigna Radiata ‘mung bean’ मूँग (mũng) < Sanskrit मु॒द्ग (mudga).
The words among, mongrel and mingle also derive from the *mangijana root. Among is a contracted form of an Old English compound of on + ymong ‘company, assembly, mixture’ and was originally a prepositional phrase meaning ‘into a crowd’ or ‘in the midst of’, before becoming a preposition in its own right. Mongrel, originally ‘dog with parents of different breeds’, and in an early sense, ‘offspring of a dog and a wolf’ has developed unpleasant undertones, exacerbated by the offensive term mong as a clipping of the now, thankfully, disused term Mongol for ‘person with Down’s Syndrome’ as well as the -rel diminutive suffix, which often has pejorative force – cockerel, doggerel, wastrel etc. Mongrel is also used in a variety of derogatory contexts: e.g. as a racial slur applied to people of mixed race, or simply as a synonym for ‘worthless’ or ‘contemptible’. Mingle is simply a frequentative form of ming – frequentative verbs express intensified or repeated action or movement and in English typically end in -le – crackle < crack, dazzle < daze and dribble < drip – or in -er – clamber < climb, flutter < float and slither < slide. As a noun, mingle is also used in North American estate agents’ jargon for ‘a person who shares a home with someone who is not a partner or relative’. Typical mingles are young adults who can get onto the property ladder for the first time by pooling their money to buy a home together.
Finally, we return to the foul-smelling, disagreeable members of the family ming. Stinkers from both sides of the Atlantic seem to be involved in the shift towards olfactory unpleasantness, as the ming mixture morphs into human excrement. The oldest source is Old English micgge ‘urine’, which became Middle English mygge and the rare Modern English mig, which as well as ‘urine’ means ‘liquid manure’ or ‘drainings from the dunghill’ – it’s so delightful that English has a cornucopia of words for this type of thing, we should be so proud. American slang has the probably related mang for ‘slush around a pigsty’ and mung for ‘unpleasant, messy substance’, aka ‘crud’ or ‘guck’, with its accompanying adjective mungy ‘soiled’. However, the chief origin of today’s mingers appears to be Scottish ming ‘human waste’, which was first attested in 1923. Ming soon developed into ‘unpleasant stench’, now the most common meaning. This reeking ming produced minging ‘stinking’ and by extension ‘very drunk’ and ‘very ugly’, the latter sense spawning the noun minger ‘extremely unattractive person’. That’s my cue to wind this up by citing the Super Furry Animals lyric from their single Hello Sunshine: ‘I’m a minger / You’re a minger too / So come on minger / I want to ming with you.’ And as you’ve got this far, it just remains for me to thank you for letting me do so!