{"id":13957,"date":"2012-01-16T19:08:20","date_gmt":"2012-01-17T03:08:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/neology\/2012\/01\/16\/arsy-tansy.html"},"modified":"2012-01-16T19:08:20","modified_gmt":"2012-01-17T03:08:20","slug":"arsy-tansy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2012\/01\/16\/arsy-tansy\/","title":{"rendered":"arsy-tansy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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

\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

(After I post this entry, of course, that will no longer be true.)<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n

\n

“We used to think Bennington girls were artsy-tansy dykes,” counters the former captain of the debating team.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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

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.)<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

And coming at it from the other side: have any of you encountered the word “arsy-tansy” in other contexts?<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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