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Monday 2 August 2021

Spot the Frippet: a crimp.

 A crimp used to be someone who cheated people into joining the Navy.

That hasn't happened for a long time, luckily. Not in England, anyway.

The more usual kind of a crimp, where things are pinched together to join them, or possibly just to make them wriggly is probably unrelated.

Where will you find your crimp? On a head?


On a pie? 


On a sheep?

Lincoln longwool sheep. Photo by Jane Cooper Orkney

Or a tin?

photo by Rainer Zenz

The word crimp has other meanings, too. If you're crimping a piece of fish then you're not pinching it together, but opening it up by slashing the skin to make it crisp when cooked. If you're making shoes, then the bending of the leather is crimping it. If you're bending a piece of metal to make a cylinder, then that process is crimping, too.

It's really enough to make you wonder where the word originated.

Spot the Frippet: crimp. The Old English form of this word was crympan and means bent. It's related to the Old Norse kreppa, which means to contract, and the Old Swedish crumb, which means crooked.

No one is sure where the Navy word comes from, but that kind of a crimp sounds pretty crooked, too.



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