Time off in Looe

Today's title is brought to you by courtesy of TiredPunsᴚus (Inc.)

Milles zexcuses, as they used to say in the FRENCH notes file ...

<glossary>
(Notes files were a collaborative tool used in the world-wide DECnet network [of, in its heyday, more than 100,000 users], and one of my favourites was FRENCH – which gave me access to thousands of Francophones [not unlike Twitter in some  respects, only 25 years earlier and with no limit on character count]. For further information on Notes files, a feature of my work life in the '80s and '90s [when recreational notes files were stamped out by the bean counters], see here. )
</glossary>

...for the recent radio silence. Deadlines have been crowding together. Yesterday I  submitted my entry for the Stephen Spender Prize ("for Poetry in Translation" to give its old, useful name, now suppressed for unknown [and probably unfathomable] reasons). And this morning I had mail from the organisers of the John Dryden Translation Competition, announcing the latest in a series of Covid-related judging delays. So my cup will run over in September, when both sets of results are due, although the submissions were five months apart. (The also-rans  get to hear later but  a fellow can dream).

A word that has come into its own recently (Covid-assisted via the NHS app), and which I've been thinking about for some time, is PING.

<autobiographical_note>
In the late '80s I came across UNIX (an operating system) – or more specifically ULTRIX (the flavour of UNIX designed to run on DEC systems). I was not a heavy user of UNIX, but its online help was delivered by way of something called a MANPAGE(I imagine this was just an abbreviation for "manual pages" as they were really simple text files), and I had to understand UNIX enough to produce MANPAGEs and get them to display appropriately. So I found myself fairly close to the coining of a backronym that has now been in use in the computing world for nearly forty years; and I suspect it may have influenced the spread of a non-digital ...

<glossary>
(by which I mean "having nothing to do with computers"; but computers and IT people and their jargon are never far from modern business – and if one  IT person says to another "I'll ping you" [meaning "I'll test the network between our machines using the PING protocol"] it's not impossible that a computer virgin might have overheard it and assumed it was just a cool synonym for "make contact with"...

<tangent>
To take  another example of  technical jargon leaking into business-speak I remember my first sighting of "Can we take this offline?" – meaning "Let's discuss this later" – delivered by a besuited man [whose main use of IT was to use a batch-job...

<meta-tangent>
In the VMS world, a batch-job was a way of automating a repetitive  process
 </meta-tangent>

... {written by a tame engineer} to read his mail and print it all out every half hour]. Of course, he seldom got round to reading it, and the print room was consequently full of his arrangements to "do lunch". And this was in the days of fan-fold paper and line-printers, so we are talking serious pollution.
<tangent>

...) 

</glossary>

... homonym in the business world

PING was named,according to its writer, after  an analogy to his student work on sonar systems: 

From my point of view PING is not an acronym standing for Packet InterNet Grouper, it's a sonar analogy. 

Horse's mouth

 But a backronym was soon formed; according to  that source (who ought to know, having invented it). It was Packet InterNet Grouper. In Wikipedia's account, even the original word Grouper [sic] didn't survive: it is the Packet InterNet Groper. I have no idea what "Grouper" means in  this context; it might even be a typo for "Groper". But Groper strikes me as irrelevant, and pretty lame even for an IT-related backronym (a rich field, headed by SPAM).
<autobiographical_note>

 But having spent the afternoon dodging the showers...

<tangent>
(which reminds me of some Knowles juvenilia, probably dating from the time when I thought Cyril Fletcher  (of Odd Odes fame) was the Rat's Pyjamas:

Showers
Be they ne'er so scattered met
Are yet
As wet

</tangent>

...while deploying a lawn mower (or rotary cat-sh1t distributor) I must go and get on with Stuff.

b