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“Ping me” really threw me for a loop the first time I heard a non-tech say it in an obvious non-tech way.

It literally has no other meaning outside of the ICMP echo utility; and the onomatopoeia of hitting glass.

How did it enter the Business world?




Ping comes from submarine sonar - not the networking world.

Everyone of a certain age will have seen a half dozen submarine WW2 or Cold War films so regular people do have context.

And there's nothing wrong with it.

'Learnings' is an odd word but it actually makes sense because there are no perfect substitutes. 'Insights' isn't quite it.


I think the word 'learnings' comes to software companies from India. A company I worked at didn't use the word until an Indian senior manager came on, and then everyone started talking about 'learnings.' Conversely, I have heard it used in conversational English between people from India.

There are plenty of other English words that work in context where you might use 'learning', like 'lesson', 'insight', or 'takeaway'. 'Learning' just encapsulates them all without nuance.


A possible alternative to "learning" is "lesson". The problem with "lesson" is that it can have two meanings:

(a) a formal lecture given by a qualified person to a class;

(b) a fact that you learned from any person or even just a situation you were in.

"Lesson" in the sense (b) is a direct substitute for "a learning", but I have to admit a few people might sometimes interpret it as (a) and be confused. But it depends on the context - if a project report has a "lessons learnt" heading I don't think any reader is going to expect that means meaning (a).


Yeah - 'lessons learned' is idiomatically more tantamount to something 'learned after having made an error'.

I'll bet there are words in other languages that more perfectly capture the meaning of 'learnings' - and admittedly it's a really ugly colloquialism ... but I would accept it out of a resigned pragmatism.


> It literally has no other meaning outside of the ICMP echo utility

What about in the context of a sonar system on a submarine? My first encounter of the term was probably The Hunt for Red October.


Not that it answers your question, but here is a fairly interesting article on "ping me": https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/01/history-of-ping-a-w...


I'm confused here. I thought what I thought of as "ping me" was obvious, but since you didn't state what I'm thinking of I guess not. Are we talking about slack/discord/teams pings here? If so the use is the onomatopoeia.




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