Characterize this

When defense secretary Leon Panetta said he didn't want to "characterize" the electronic communication between Florida socialite Jill Kelly and General Allen, what did he mean?

He added that he "didn't want to do anything," implying thereby that an act of characterizing would be tantamount to doing something.

Doing what?

In a parlance of writing, at least in the parlance that I am familiar with, to "characterize" is to label, or to give something a specific name and ergo an unique identity. Thus to "characterize" would be an active verb in the realm of writing.

I remember asking students in my creative non-fiction class to "characterize" the particular quality of beauty or tragedy (among others) they see in something.

For instance, we would discuss the classic photograph of Marilyn Monroe--the one where she is giving off a full-lipped smile--and students would be encouraged to claim ownership of the beauty that they see and understand in the image through an adjective: how is the image beautiful? Characterize!

No sooner than the active verb of characterizing was released into the classroom, students would generally feel at a loss about what was being asked of them.

But out of the fog would emerge something interesting.

Somebody would squeak out "tragic." That would be a characterizing word indeed, I would assure them. We would go on from there into more specific ways of characterizing the quality of Monroe's "beauty." 

A fab example of a characterizing word is "hard." In her pithy essay on artist Georgia O'Keefe, Joan Didion, nails the quality of the appeal of O'Keefe's painting as "hard." there is a certain "hardness" about her work, claims Didion. 

To "characterize" something, then is to commit oneself to a very specific interpretation in an unambiguous (though complex) way.

When Panetta refused to "characterize" the communication under investigation (as "sexually explicit"--the media's characterizing word of choice), he refused a commitment.

How predictably political of him.