Walking the cat

[Garson O'Toole]

Safire's Political Dictionary by William Safire

Definition: walking back the cat

 In diplomacy, retreating from a negotiating position; in intelligence
gathering, examining old analyses in light of new information.

Foreign Service officers use this diplomatic slang, which is similar
to the "down off the mountaintop" expression of labor leaders faced
with the need to reduce demands.  (See MOUNTAINTOP.) When President
Carter's chief armaments negotiator, Paul Warnke, was criticized for
making an unrevealed concession to the Soviets in strategic arms
limitation talks, columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak wrote in
1977: "The 600-kilometer mystery, therefore, raises suspicions that
Paul Warnke will begin 'walking back the cat' on the Carter SALT
package, unless checked by the President himself."

A second meaning, in spookspeak, emerged in an 1986 opinion piece in
the Chicago Tribune discussing the investigation into the troubling
past of Austrian and later UN leader Kurt Waldheim: "Intelligence
agencies are now 'walking back the cat'—reconstructing events and
decisions in light of Waldheim's Nazi past and who might have known
and made use of it."

(The above text may contain errors. Also, Safire's analysis may be
incorrect and/or incomplete.)

WordSpy website of Paul McFedries

Definition: walk the cat back

v. To attempt to understand the true nature of a situation by
reconstructing events chronologically from the present to the past.

(Sample citations given on webpage)

http://www.wordspy.com/words/walkthecatback.asp


On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 10:02 PM, George Thompson
<george.thompson at nyu.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       George Thompson <george.thompson at NYU.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Walking the cat
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Larry cites an item from The Daily Kos, 2006, in which the writer uses the phrase without explaining it, which suggests that he expects his readers to be familiar with it, that it has a history previous to this passage.
>
> The meaning which the expression has in this 2006 passage is something like "refute" or "expose the dastardly motives of those who are propagating a false story".  David Carr is writing about Newsweek, which has been put up for sale, and is speculating about who might want to buy it, and why, and also why it may work out that no one will want it.  He supposes that "nascent Web news sites" will not be interested in acquiring the name-recognition or mystique of Newsweek, because ". . . it is much less cost-intensive to build out a new brand than to try to walk back the cat on a legacy business" -- so whatever David Carr thinks "walking back the cat" means, it's something quite different from what the writer on The Daily Kos had in mind.  I'm not clear whether Carr is supposing that Newsweek could be pushed at one of these Web news sites as a print-on-paper incarnation of their web activities, or as a source of reputation or readership that can be transferred to their web site
> -- but in any case, "revive" or "repurpose" would come close.
>
> Finally: isn't "walk back the cat" an odd sequence of words?  I myself would be unlikely ever to talk of cat-walking, my experience being that cats walk when and where they will, but if I were to do so, I would say "walk the cat back".
>
> GAT
>
> George A. Thompson
> Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Date: Monday, May 31, 2010 8:41 pm
> Subject: Re: Walking the cat
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>
>> At 8:30 PM -0400 5/31/10, George Thompson wrote:
>> >  >From David Carr's "Media Equation" column in Monday's NYTimes
>> >Business section (section B, p. 1 & 8, quoting p. 8, col. 1).
>> >
>> >. . . it is much less cost-intensive to build out a new brand than
>> >to try to walk back the cat on a legacy business.
>> >
>> >What does this mean?  I'm baffled, as is my cat Panurge.
>> >
>> >GAT
>> Apparently no cats are harmed in the practice, but consequences for
>> humans may be less sanguine.  Here's an entry from the Daily Kos blog
>> on the expression:  http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/5/21/7496/03568
>>
>> There's also an eponymous book:
>> http://www.amazon.com/Walk-Back-Cat-Pamela-Ewen/dp/0805443444
>>
>> LH
>>
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