Other articles by William Safire:

My opinion William Safire : We're overwatching president's participles My opinion William Safire : It's time to suspend your disbelief My opinion William Safire: 'Adultalescents' and other gyrations of campuspeakMy opinion William Safire : After the ink dries, the deal is done My opinion William Safire : Charting incoherent way forward William Safire: Exercising intellect vital to a full lifeWilliam Safire: Nation's character creates its destinyWilliam Safire: Post-tsunami suffering not God's punishmentWilliam Safire: Israeli chief an optimistWilliam Safire: How 2005 is expected to shake out

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Have you ever heard anyone articulate the adjective "articulable"? It's a surefire stumble-over word, to be read and not spoken, concocted by lawyers in the past few decades to fit into the narrow space between clear and specific. Though it hasn't made it into many dictionaries, articulable may turn out to be a word that helps bridge the divide between civil liberty and national security.

On the side of liberty, there's a need to preserve the ability of our free press. On security's side, there's a need to preserve our government's power to thwart dangerous terrorist plots.

Though partisanship is in the saddle these days, a bill in the Judiciary Committees of Congress — shepherded by the Democrat Pat Leahy and the Republican Arlen Specter in the Senate and the liberal John Conyers and the conservative Mike Pence in the House of Representatives — is, despite election fever, making progress toward striking a balance of these two central values with their passage of the Free Flow of Information Act of 2007. (Disclosure: I testified — first time in 33 years as an opinionmonger — for this bill giving reporters the same ability to protect confidential sources as the privilege not to testify held by doctors, lawyers, the clergy, psychologists and every spouse in the country. Used plain words.)

Now to "articulable."

The sticking point in this legislation was the key exception to the journalist's right to protect a whistle-blower. The House committee said that testimony of a reporter could be compelled "to prevent imminent and actual harm to national security." That makes sense in striking the balance, but the Justice Department wanted a fuzzier standard.

In the markup of the Senate bill, the phrase "preventing a specific case of terrorism against the United States" was watered down at Justice's behest to "preventing an act of terrorism"; the loss of the hard, understandable "specific," however, was rebalanced somewhat by modifying the following "or significant harm" to "other significant and articulable harm."

I have seen the crossing-out and handwritten added word on the draft bill but will not reveal my sources (Cagney or Bogart: "Come and get me, coppers!"). They tell me that with "specific" deleted and with "concrete" too strong, they were "looking for a justiciable standard"; asked what the word pronounced jus-TISH-able meant, the answer was "a word that judges can pour meaning into."

Aha!

Now we're in my etymological-semantic bailiwick. "Articulable" is a favorite in Fourth Amendment cases, dealing with the permissibility of warrentless police searches. In Terry v. Ohio, decided in 1968, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote for the Supreme Court: ". . . in justifying the particular intrusion, the police officer must be able to point to specific and articulable facts which . . . reasonably warrant that intrusion." He went on to use a form of the word on which articulable was, as they say about judicial decisions, bottomed: "Anything less would invite intrusion upon constitutionally guaranteed rights based on nothing more substantial than inarticulate hunches." Concurring, Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote that he found stop-and-frisk "on articulable suspicion less than probable cause" to be reasonable.

It has crossed over into education politics; Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York said this spring that his state's public university system had not permitted "one articulable strategy." It's also an FBI favorite phrase: Even before passage of the Patriot Act in 2001, The Boston Globe noted this year, the FBI could issue national security letters "to get data on persons it had 'specific and articulable' reasons to believe were terrorists."

What does the word mean?

Anatomists know that the Latin root, articulare, means "to divide into joints"; from that we get the joining of words into clear, understandable speech. As a verb, to articulate means "to enunciate clearly" or "to express well in words"; as an adjective, articulate is "well spoken," sometimes even "glib."

Most of us have no trouble with "articulate," verb and modifier.

The problem is with "articulable."

Although it is well defined in Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of Law as "capable of being expressed, explained or justified," in some usages above it is treated as a synonym for "specific"; in others, it's a substitute for that hard-edged word that protects civil liberty.

In the bill I'm rooting for the House and Senate to pass and the president to sign, I take articulable to mean: "You have to explain in words on the judicial record exactly why you're insisting that the reporter burn his source. Then a judge will decide if that possible harm is significant enough to outweigh the public interest in not weakening the First Amendment."

As a word maven, I'd rather use "articulatable," rhyming with "debatable". To public speakers, as well as to the free flow of information, its benefit would be incalculable.

My opinion