Dot Wordsworth

The ding-dong over being ‘pinged’

[Getty Images]

‘Ping, ping, ping went the bell,’ sang my husband, making his eyes wide and jigging in his best imitation of Judy Garland, ‘Zing, zing, zing went my heart strings.’ The effect was horrific. And ‘The Trolley Song’ doesn’t go ‘Ping, ping, ping’ but ‘Ding, ding, ding’.

Everything else has been pinging, though. ‘Missing a holiday because you’ve been pinged can be a big disappointment,’ remarked the Daily Mirror, solicitously. The pinging in question is that of the NHS Test and Trace phone app.

Incidentally, the government has made a breakthrough in moral philosophy during this pandemic, distinguishing between should and must. ‘If the app tells you to self-isolate, then you should self-isolate,’ said the late health secretary. ‘But if an NHS Test and Trace contact tracer tells you, then you must by law.’ Must in this language is law; should is the kind of must that is not the law, such as that you should be faithful to your wife.

Ping is not an ancient word and derives from the interjection imitative of the sound of a bullet. ‘The sharp ping of the Minié was sure to follow any imprudent exposure,’ wrote the Times correspondent from the Crimea in 1855, referring to a new kind of rifle bullet.

A parallel word is pink, a tinkling dripping sound. It was adopted by motorists for a symptom of internal combustion malfunction and Kipling, already happy to use ping of a bicycle bell, wrote lines in 1904 on a dying chauffeur, in parody of Adam Lindsay Gordon, the poet of Australia: ‘That cursed left-hand cylinder the doctors call my heart / Is pinking past redemption — I am done!’

In the second world war, Asdic, the echo-sounder for finding submarines, found the word handy for its audible alert.

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