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The Keep your English up to date podcast from BBCLearningEnglish.com in this week's program, John Ato explains the origin, meaning and use of the word minging.
Minging.
There's no getting away from it.
We human beings seem to be at our most inventive when we're thinking up words to insult each other with.
A select list of adjectives we've applied over the past hundred years to people or things we find disgusting would include scroungy, skanky, manky, icky, grotty, grungy, poxy, scuzzy, oncus that's Australian, yucky, snotty, septic, gross.
I could go on.
One recent addition to this armoury of scorn is especially versatile and, given its history, fairly pungent.
It's minging.
That curry he cooked up for us last night was really ming.
We have Scotland to thank for it.
In Scottish English, ming is an old word for a bad smell.
So originally, minging meant smelly, as it still can.
But of course, calling someone smelly is a perfect way of insulting them.
And around the year 2000, British teenagers started using it more broadly to mean disgusting.
It can also mean ugly or unattractive.
And in an interesting development similar to stinking, you can use it to say, someone is drunk, he'd only had two pints and he was minging.
And along with minging, there's minger.
Now, calling someone a minger is a really bad insult.