Bump
Posted on 05/09/2004 7:45:45 PM PDT by Libloather
Report ASAP on the new 'pester'
William Safire
Monday, May 10, 2004
WASHINGTON "Is it not possible, sir," said the inquisitor Richard Ben-Veniste of the witness before the 9/11 commission, "that were you to have pulsed the FBI … that that information might have been made available to you?"
"I think it's pretty clear that I was pulsing the FBI," Attorney General John Ashcroft replied.
That unfamiliar verb was used earlier in the public hearings by the former Clinton Justice Department official Jamie Gorelick, who asked another witness, "Instead of waiting for the intelligence community to feed you the list of items … you and security can pulse the system and say, What have you got out there that we ought to be thinking about?"
This public exposure of a government insiders' verb not only set the heartbeat of lexicographers racing, but was also instantly picked up by talking heads. When MSNBC's Chris Matthews asked who first used the phrase summer of threat, Newsweek's Howard Fineman replied, "It's become part of the lexicon along with shaking the trees and pulsing the system." I have already explored the etymology of hair on fire and silver bullet; now it's time to place two fingers over our wrists and feel the new sense of pulse.
In its governmental sense of "sending an electric shock through the bureaucracy to stimulate a response," it has been beating slowly since at least 1989. The Washington Post reported that General Larry Welch of the U.S. Air Force said he was "'pulsing the system' to see what was politically acceptable before forwarding his recommendation to Defense Secretary Dick Cheney on how the nation's land missile force should be modernized."
In 2001, on barely his first day on the job as treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill told Business Week that the way to avert a "failure of anticipation" of international crises was to "create a process of 'pulsing' people around the world."
After a review of this word history, few will nonconcur that pulsing has now joined tasking (the assignment to carry out a particular project) as an indispensable verb in the language of the Organization Person.
The noun pulse, rooted in the Latin pellere, "to drive, beat, push," is the rhythmic throbbing of the arteries, as the blood therein is propelled by the heart's beating.
As an intransitive verb, it is often used as pulsate, as in Erasmus Darwin's observation: "The heart of a viper or frog will continue to pulsate long after it is taken from the body." (I repeated this experiment in biology class at the Bronx High School of Science, which is why I did not evolve into a scientist.)
But it is the rare transitive use of the verb, with the action sent on to an object, that catches the attention of philologists. In this action-oriented usage, you don't just sit there pulsing, throbbing, intransitively staying alive; you pulse the system, regularly pushing, annoying, demanding.
A semantic precedent exists in warfare: Thomas Carlyle, writing in 1865 about Frederick the Great, noted, "Such charging and recharging, pulsing and repulsing, has there been." (If the attorney general pulses the system, can the system repulse the attorney general?)
I pulsed a Department of Justice spokesman about this, and he said, on background, that the way the department interpreted the question "Why didn't you pulse them?" was, in non-inside-the-Beltway terms, "Why didn't you bug them about it?" He added that pulse is not shorthand normally used in the department.
Another definition came to me from elsewhere on "deep background," which means that I must pretend that I have no source for it at all and that the thought just hit me like a bolt from the blue: The best synonym for the transitive vogue verb pulse is "pester."
She needs to testify...
Or should I say repesterive?
David Brooks "gets" the WOT and writes some great editorials. Bill Safire writes some pretty good columns, particularly about Israel.
Bump
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