The term Cookie Pusher has been applied as a reference to diplomats in general and members of the United States Foreign Service specifically.

(Everybody denies it, but many civil servants, derogated as bureaucrats by the elite foreign service corps, still refer to the diplomats as cookie pushers.)

DoubleClick, which describes itself as the world's largest Internet advertising company, is not the only cookie pusher on the Web, and it is certainly not the worst.

Thornton A. Wilson, former C.E.O. at Boeing, referred to Peterson as the company's "chief cookie pusher."

The Listserv of the American Dialect Society documents "cookie pusher" as being coined by US diplomat Hugh S. Gibson in 1924.

That was a reference to a column after a couple of her gaffes, suggesting she stop defining herself by what she was not - not a man-bystander, not a cookie pusher - and start defining herself by what she was.

In diplomacy and foreign correspondence, cookie pushers and pencil pushers alike vied for some term of universal acceptance that would counter the cold-war secrecy prevalent in the late 60's and the back-channeling of Henry Kissinger in the early 70's.

It was in these circumstances that he described the undesirable elements of the Foreign Service as "the boys with the white spats, the tea drinkers, the cookie pushers," suggesting that they could be replaced by better men attracted by more favorable conditions resulting from the passage of the bill.

And online cookie pushers are benign and well behaved compared with direct marketers who begin building consumer dossiers on children from their birth announcements and school records, who know within 24 hours from your credit card records that you bought underwear at Bloomingdale's and who will sell that information to almost anyone.