For "The Americans" Season Opener, Get Your "Tradecraft" On

In a review of FX's Cold War-era thriller "The Americans," which begins its third season tonight, New York Times critic Alessandra Stanley expects her readers to know what she means by the term tradecraft when she writes:

The tradecraft on “The Americans” is a lot more sophisticated than real-life espionage seems to be nowadays.

Tradecraft is a deliciously insider-y term that refers to the traditional work of spies. In a "Behind the Dictionary" investigation last year, Neal Whitman wrote that the word "has been making its way into more mainstream consciousness recently, as we hear about operations like the search for Osama bin Laden, or about Edward Snowden's training as a spy." (Stanley points out that of late we're hearing mostly examples of poorly executed tradecraft, such as the recent filing of criminal charges against a Russian spy and his handlers.)

Whitman used the Google Ngram Viewer to compare occurences of tradecraft with the less popular synonym spycraft.

He then went on to explain tradecraft's origin and the reasons for its rise:

Tradecraft didn't start out with this intelligence-related meaning. The Oxford English Dictionary has it from 1812 with the meaning "the craft or art of trading or dealing." This citation from 1899 illustrates it well: "It is a lesson in tradecraft … to see how the girl holds her own with the dealers." And even now you can find examples like those lonely four that I found in COCA, as well as the occasional company name, like this building products outfit, or this provider of carrying cases for remote-control helicopters.

The origin of the modern tradecraft, according to the OED, is the use of the trade to refer to the British Secret Service. Here's their earliest example, from 1966: "'How long,' I asked her, 'have you been in the trade?'.. 'Three years, on active ops.'" But that can't be the full story. Unlike tradecraft, the phrase in the trade does not have strong connotations of spying and intelligence. Looking through the COCA examples, it's easy to find examples of in the trade referring to such diverse occupations as show business, agribusiness, rocketry, and physical anthropology. Why don't we immediately think of memorizing lines, transporting grain, calculating trajectories, or sorting shards of bone when we hear the word tradecraft?

Enter the Cold War, or more specifically, the Cold War as a source of entertainment. Novels with the Cold War as their backdrop provide some of the earliest attestations of tradecraft in its modern sense. More specifically still, novelist and former spy John le Carré is the source of the OED's first citation, from his first novel, 1961's Call for Dead: "He was suddenly alert... Was it the latent skill of his own tradecraft which informed him?" Le Carré, in fact, is the source of several early hits for tradecraft, in novels such as Looking Glass War (1965), Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), and The Honourable Schoolboy (1977)...

In fact, some associate the word tradecraft so strongly with John le Carré as to assume he coined the word, at least in this intel-ops sense. On the website TV Tropes and Idioms, John le Carré  has his own page, and in listing notable points about his novels, one editor has called out tradecraft as an example of life imitating art, or in the words of TVTI, "defictionalization." As the editor puts it, "Some spy-speak that le Carré just made up, such as 'tradecraft', is now actually used by MI-5 and MI-6 agents in Real Life." Le Carré himself, however, strongly disagrees. In a communication sent via his publicist, he writes:

I claim no originality for 'tradecraft' whatsoever.  It is a word that was officially in service in intelligence circles, certainly at the time of my own training in the '50s and '60s, and it has endured ever since.  Whoever it was who derided my use of it was totally misinformed.

So if you choose to join the tradecraft party, be rest assured it's an authentic term.

You can read the rest of Whitman's piece here. And if it's not just spies, but the Cold War Era setting of "The Americans" that you find exciting, check out our word list "The Vocabulary of Soviet-Era Nostalgia & Cold War Spy Words" to travel back in time.