WsOTY? "New Cold War"; "to ping"

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Sun Mar 16 13:41:20 UTC 2014


On Mar 15, 2014, at 11:31 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:

> On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 8:12 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
>
>> "To ping" -- to signal in an attempt to make a remote communications
>> connection, which the missing Malaysia Airlines flight 370 apparently
>> did for four hours after it went missing from radar.
>>
>
>  What is PING?
>
>
> As a verb, _ping_ means "to get the attention of" or "to check for the
> presence of" another party on line. The computer acronym (for Packet
> Internet or Inter-Network Groper) was contrived to match the submariners'
> term for the sound of a returned sonar pulse.

So one more for the Backronym files…

LH
>
> What is _ping_? - Definition from WhatIs.com - SearchNetworking.com
>
> searchnetworking.techtarget.com/definition/ping
> --
> -Wilson
> -----
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
> come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> -Mark Twain
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



More information about the Ads-l mailing list