So, I told a colleague today that I would ping someone to see about the status of something, and then went back to the colleague to say that I had completed the task, but was unsure whether I should say “pinged” as the past tense of “ping.”
If you look at other verbs with similar construction, like “ring,” “sing,” you’d say “I rang the bell,” or “I sang the song,” or “the song was sung very well,” you obviously wouldn’t say “I singed the song,” or “I ranged the bell,” so it seems a bit weird to say “I pinged someone about the status of your request,” right?
But, “pinged” seems to be the most common. I’ve never heard anyone say “I pang the server” or “the server has been pung repeatedly and it fails to respond to pings.”
Stick with pinged or should phrases be reworded to avoid using a past tense of ping altogether?
If this blog was a child, family services would have taken it away by now…
Sorry for the blog neglect, life’s been a whirlwind of activity for the last month or so. For those of you who don’t know already — I switched jobs at the beginning of September.
I’m now working as the editor-in-chief of Linux Magazine (the original, accept-no-substitutes Linux Magazine, by the way), which is an awesome gig. However, with “awesome” comes a lot of work and a lot of getting up to speed on doing things the print way. After years of doing the online publishing thing, print is a whole new world. (”Word count? What’s that? What do you mean we have to fill space / cut word count? How, exactly, can a paragraph have an orphan?”)
I worked on print stuff in college, and of course I wrote for Linux Magazine for years prior to working for Linux.com, but actually dealing with the layout stuff was pretty new. (Speaking of which — anybody know a Linux proggy that will actually open QuarkXPress docs?)
So, in September I not only took the new job, but also went to VMworld for a week and the Ohio LinuxFest for a weekend. September was chock full of busy and I’m sure that October will be too, but not quite as much.
What have you been up to?