Bing

Filed Under August 2007, columns 

I might be interested if the tiles were edible.

Dear Word Detective: I come from Scotland but now live in the U.S. I was playing a Scrabble game and used the word “bing” but it was not in the Scrabble dictionary. I am sure my husband used it when talking about the coal mines. Maybe it was slang. Any help you can give me will be much appreciated. — Sophie Murray.

Oh boy, Scrabble. I love word games. Wait, no, sorry, I just remembered that I actually hate word games. The rub is that people naturally assume that I must be very good at word games, which I am not. Perhaps I could be if I tried, but I don’t plan to try. I’m with grammarian Geoffrey Pullum when he says, “The expressive power of human language is barely adequate to convey the profound level of apathy word puzzles provoke in me.” (You can read his entire rant, which I heartily recommend, here).

I’m not sure who concocts Scrabble dictionaries or what criteria they use when admitting words to their hallowed roster, but for my money they blew it in the case of “bing.” It is, as the Simpsons would say, a perfectly cromulent word.

“Bing” first appeared in English in the early 16th century meaning, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “A heap or pile: formerly of stones, earth, trees, dead bodies, as well as of corn, potatoes, and the like.” Although that general meaning is still in use in dialects of northern England, by around 1815, “bing” had acquired the specific meaning of “a heap of metallic, especially lead, ore” or alum ore, which explains how you husband came to mention it in connection with mines. “Bing,” since the late 17th century, had also been applied to the best, richest ores (”bing ore”). The root of “bing” in English is the Old Norse word “bing,” meaning simply “heap.”

One wonders, incidentally, when “cromulent” will make it into dictionaries. To quote Wikipedia on the term’s origins on The Simpsons, “When schoolteacher Edna Krabappel hears the Springfield town motto, ‘A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man,’ she comments she’d never heard of the word ‘embiggens’ before moving to Springfield. Miss Hoover, another teacher, replies, ‘I don’t know why; it’s a perfectly cromulent word’.”

 

 

Comments

2 Responses to “Bing”

  1. tdrinane on August 1st, 2007 7:34 am

    hmmmm . . .

    I remember in the days when I was working as a drug rehabilitation counselor in a residential treatment center (aka, prison lite), among the very rich street vocabulary I encountered was the reference to a disciplinary area as “the bing.” This was a sort of solitary confinement, which, because it was used to attempt to control recalcitrant residents, was also known as “the recal area.” As I recall, neither term was in favor with the administration, while bing was favored by residents and recal by officers.

    My favorite was the coinage of one of the residents of the term “recal bing.”

  2. Bingner on September 9th, 2007 3:01 pm

    My Name is Steve Bingner. When my family first came to the USA from Germany in 1898 our surname was Bingener. My grandfather John Henry changed it to Bingner, he dropped the “e”. Using the information provided above, I would almost think that Bingner meant a person that worked with iron ore. (ner meaning person who worked with)

    The problem of course is that Bingner was not our name when we came to this country.

    What might the name Bingener have meant at the time it was created in Germany, if that is where it was in fact created.

    Thanks for your help.

    steve bingner

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