Sun, May 09, 2004 page9

• `Pulsing' sets the hearts of all linguists racing

  • By William Safire / NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  "Is it not possible, sir," said the inquisitor Richard Ben-Veniste of the witness before the Sept. 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 exposure of a government insider's 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. Washington Post reporter George Wilson reported that Air Force General Larry Welch 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."

  On barely his first day as treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill told Business Week 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's history, few will non-concur 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 AG?)

  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."

  KICKBACK

  A vituperative right-wing scandalmonger, fulminating about the billions gone down the drain in the UN's oil-for-food program, slyly asked in his political column, "What's French for kickback?" This was a nefarious attempt to besmear French politicians and companies for inflating prices so as to pay a bribe to the Iraqi government.

  A reader in Paris responded, "Kickbacks in French are pots de vin." Apparently a jug of wine is the metaphor for a more substantial percentage of the payment corruptly returned. This is done dessous de table, which Americans understand as "under the table." A reader in La Jolla, California, Eric Naegle, noted that an Arabic or Turkish word -- baksheesh -- which sometimes means "tip, gratuity," is also used in France to describe a more sinister form of payment.

  The Russians have a word for it, too: A Russian expert at the Voice of America tells me otkat -- literally, "to roll something away from you" -- was criminal slang, but is now used by newspapers and politicians to mean kickback.

  And in China, it's huikou, which sounds like "whey ko" (and also like a city in Texas). Kou generally means "keep, hold" and hui means "back."

  Those are the main languages that seemed relevant to check about kickbacks in Iraq.
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