In the search for the remains of flight MH370, a pulse signal was detected beneath the ocean. The BBC called it a ‘ping’, in inverted commas on its website and with the spoken equivalent in broadcasts, as if ping were too demotic to be used with due respect.
Ping seems joky only because its origin is imitative. In naval slang, the operator of an Asdic echo-sounder in the second world war was known as a ping-man or ping-jockey (by analogy with disc-jockey, first heard in 1941). Asdic is an acronym coined in 1939 from ‘Allied submarine detection investigation committee’. (The word acronym appeared in English in 1940 to mean a word made up of named initials, such as TLS, and from about 1943 with the slightly different meaning of a word composed of initials and pronounced as spelt, such as Nato or Radar. So in 1939 no one would have called Asdic an acronym.)
The Asdic went *ping* when an object showed up. The so-called black boxes of aircraft send out ultrasonic signals underwater that register as pings. A machine called a ‘towed pinger locator’, shaped like a ray fish, can with luck detect them under the sea.
Ping predates the use of radio, emerging in the 1830s with reference to the sound of bullets. ‘Compare pong,’ suggests the Oxford English Dictionary, even though, except in ping-pong, the audible pong has been swamped by the olfactory kind. Also available are bing, ding, ting (a-ling), not to mention the tinkle-plink favoured by Boris Johnson. Ping throve. In Travels in West Africa, Mary Kingsley used it with Wodehousean flair. ‘Never have I seen sandflies and mosquitoes in such appalling quantities, she wrote. ‘With a wild ping of joy the latter made for me.’
The Americans took up ping for the noise of an engine when it pinks, as we say. (Pink has a fabulously complex history, but here it is simply an alternative imitative word.) Just about everything pings now: barcode scanners, microwaves, mobiles. People ping over emails. More sinisterly, electronic machines silently ping your electronic machine just to see if it is awake and pings back. It is their equivalent of a heart monitor. When the pinging stops, the machine’s dead.
Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that black boxes send out radio signals, not sound signals. This has been corrected to state that black boxes can send out both radio signals and ultrasound signals.
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