Ping Me

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jason Wyckoff calling from Graves Lake, Illinois.

Well, what is on your mind?

Well, I was listening to one of your earlier shows and you’re talking about more of the vocational vocabulary words that you use within a particular profession.

I’m in the IT industry.

And one word that I think has jumped from being a technical term to actually using it in terms of how people interact is the word ping, P-I-N-G.

And in the technical world, it’s a command line that you would use to type from one computer to basically reach out to another computer and kind of say, hey, are you there?

And you kind of get some information regarding that.

And within some of my colleagues during meetings when we’re about to break up and kind of figure out what needs to be done after a meeting,

We’d say, you know what, I’ll ping you later on that or I’ll reach out to you on that.

And it was something that was rather commonplace for me within my work.

And so my question to you is, you know, is this something that has kind of jumped from being something very specific within the IT world to something that is used a little bit more common?

Because it seems, as I’ve dealt with more people, my wife and others, when I use the word, they haven’t given me that weird look like, what am I talking about?

It’s pretty transparent, right?

Yeah, I think so.

My perspective on this is a little bit clouded from the fact that I worked in the IT industry for 15 years,

And I know both the technical sense of ping and the sense that you’re talking about,

Which means to check with somebody or to contact them quickly to see if they’ve got something to say

Or to even see if they’re there, right?

So I use it. My friends use it.

But most of my friends who use it are technical as well.

I do know that ping tends to show up pretty frequently on lists that people make of jargon that they loathe.

Words that they don’t like.

And I think it’s because it’s not part of their life.

It’s not part of their work.

And so it sounds a little forced to them, whereas for you and me, it sounds completely natural.

Yeah, I think for somebody like me, it’s sort of aspirational, you know, pain.

Like we’re saying it as if we were trying to force it on others, trying to get other people to adopt our lingo.

Is that what you’re saying?

No, no.

I’m saying that those of us who aren’t as technologically savvy might want to adopt that because it sounds cool.

But we really don’t understand exactly the fundamental meaning.

I mean, we understand the abstract meaning of it, ping, meaning to contact.

But I don’t know.

When I hear some of my peers talk about pinging somebody

Or I don’t have the bandwidth to deal with that,

To me it still sounds a little forced.

I don’t think it’s there yet.

It’s interesting.

For me, both words are so ordinary that they almost don’t require any kind of comment.

Right.

I don’t even have to explain them.

And ping, I think, is transparent because of submarines.

People see them in movies and understand the signal going out and bouncing back off of the potential target.

And it makes a pinging noise, and they get that that is what is happening.

So I assume that the word originated in the computer industry, but it sounds like it actually originated somewhere else.

I believe it originated in the early days of radar, so in a military or aerospace engineering environment,

And then was borrowed into the language of networking in the 1960s and 1970s.

And then in the 1980s, when the Internet and networks like that became a little more established in the business world,

The language started to slowly creep out of the specific technical sense and into the more general sense.

Wow, Jason, all of that in one little four-letter word.

Pretty interesting.

Well, thanks for asking about that.

Well, thanks for letting me ping you guys on this.

All right. Thank you, Jason.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

I should have known that was coming, right?

I do say that we need to keep our eyes on this,

And maybe in 10 or 20 years we’ll know for certain how well it’s going to stick.

If you’re wondering about technical jargon, you can always ping us.

The number is 1-877-929-9673 or drop by our discussion forum.

You’ll find that at waywordradio.org slash discussion.