Ping – a silly word with a heroic history

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.