The Cornish pasty shop that I often walk past has not been the most enticing venue during the recent hot weather. ‘Crimped by hand,’ is the claim in the window. I wondered whether the thumbprints of the pasty-makers are discernible, but my curiosity was not great enough to make me buy one.
The toothpaste-tube community is the other great area of interest in crimping. Toothpaste tubes are crimped shut at one end. People who are annoyed by the amount of toothpaste that resists removal from the tube are ready to invest small sums on devices to squeeze it out. These are often said to crimp the tube flat as the paste is used. Some are designed like the keys for rolling up the tops of sardine tins.
But I then read in the business pages of the paper about ‘the ongoing rise of AI answers, which crimps traffic from Google search’. By the pasty and toothpaste analogy, I took this to mean ‘squeezes traffic’. But I think I had in the back of my mind an older meaning of crimp. A crimp was someone who procured seamen by entrapping or coercing them. Sometimes the crimp would keep a lodging house for this purpose. In the 18th century, ships would pay crimps to supply them with crews, often at the expense of other ships. By analogy this is what online AI summaries do, by supplying information taken from sources that the reader will never go on to consult.
Crimp was used as a more general term for a disreputable agent. The satirical poet John Wolcot (1738-1819), who wrote under the name Peter Pindar and was one of the few poets in the late 18th century whose verses earned them money, mentioned ‘Cupid’s trusty crimp’ as a man that the vulgar call a pimp.
To crimp was also the practice of losing a horse-race for money, and the name of a card game. In German the card game was called Krimpen or Grimpen, perhaps related to French grimpe, denoting three of a kind in the game of brelan. I would like to think that Grimpen was the origin of Conan Doyle’s Grimpen Mire, about which I wrote here (18 October 2008) with quite other conclusions.
Comments