Recently in the Technology Category

Not long ago, I read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (in a printed copy, on paper—the relevance of which I'll explain later), and was struck by this bit:

He'd always said it of Mr. Leamas, always would, he was a gent. Not public school, mind, nothing arsy-tansy but a real gent.

So I got curious and looked up “arsy-tansy,” only to discover that it's a hapax legomenon: in the entirety of the web as indexed by Google, the only occurrence of that term is in the Google Books search result from that book.

(After I post this entry, of course, that will no longer be true.)

I thought maybe it was a misspelling of a more common word, so I tried searching again without the quotation marks. The only other relevant result was this:

“We used to think Bennington girls were artsy-tansy dykes,” counters the former captain of the debating team.

Except that that's an OCR error; the original text (from Jay McInerney's story “Philomena”) says “artsy-fartsy.” So that's no help.

There's another occurrence of “artsy-tansy” in an unrelated Google Books result, but that too is an OCR error for “artsy-fartsy.” (Looking at the shapes of the words “tansy” and “fartsy,” you can see how a computer might misread one for the other.)

I thought for a moment that “arsy-tansy” in the Le Carré book might also be an OCR error, but recall that the copy I was reading was printed on paper.

Still, it's possible that the book was OCRed at some point before the edition I have, which is the first Pocket Books trade paperback edition, from 2001.

So, if any of you have an older edition of the book, could you take a look? The sentence in question is near the beginning of chapter 11, in the midst of the very long second paragraph of that chapter.

And coming at it from the other side: have any of you encountered the word “arsy-tansy” in other contexts?

Way back in 1997, I introduced the term “obsolescism” to refer to a term or phrase (like “dialing” a telephone) that has lost its literal meaning but hasn't yet become entirely metaphorical.

One such term that I missed in that column is “film”; people sometimes refer to “filming” something in motion even when the medium they're recording onto is digital video. (Perhaps partly because “videoing” is kind of a clunky verb.)

I've heard “filming” used that way plenty of times, but this is the first time I've run into “taping” used that way:

Albero drained his phone's battery taping the incident[....]

—CNN article about an airplane making an emergency landing

These days, the word “filming” doesn't usually make me think of actual film, any more than “dial” makes me think of an actual phone dial. But in my lexicon, “taping” definitely refers to using the medium of videotape. (I don't think I hear it used non-literally even in the context of recording a show for later use—I hear “TiVoing” fairly often, or just “recording,” but not, I don't think, “taping.”)

I wonder if “taping” is in more common use in that context in the world of television news.

Do y'all use “taping” this way? Does it sound odd to you?

Video demo of a nifty project called Typeface 2 by Mary Huang. It analyzes the user's face and generates letters of a typeface based on things like the user opening and closing their mouth, or widening their eyes.