I didn’t knew that either, and there’s nothing embarrassing about it: pretty much every CLI tool that doesn’t have a clear name is an acronym (grep, cd, pwd, dd, yacc, etc).
and ping as well (learnt that from the mastodon thread)!
Never knew that although it seems like the acronym was contrived after the obvious "ping" (as in sonar) was coined.
Ping was originally named after sonar pings. Then later some guy came up with a weird acronym for a thing he did not invent. We don’t have to acknowledge it as a legitimate acronym. And as far as I can tell, the backronym is not a part of ping man pages, unlike with dig