push

Picture a medieval French speaker giving something a firm shove: that action was poulser, inherited from Latin pulsare, “to beat” or “strike.” The Latin verb was built as a repeated-action form of pellere, so the original image is not a single delicate tap but a series of driving blows. English adopted the word around 1300, and it gradually learned to push ideas, sales, people, and limits—not just doors and carts. By the 1980s, “push the envelope” turned physical pressure into a metaphor for testing boundaries. The same ancient family also gives us pulse and impulse: every push is, etymologically, a little thump traveling through history.