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.)