The power of words.
And words that force us to smile. Think photographers: Cheese! Pepsi! Crinkly!
I stumbled across my favourite English word several years ago.
The adjective crinkly once had celebrity status. In a British survey of readers’ favourite words, this one topped the list. I couIdn’t recall ever writing or saying it. So I tried: ‘crinkly’, I said, and said again. And again. And smiled accordingly. And understood why readers responding to the survey liked the word
so much.
Most people voice words in their minds they read on the page, and ‘crinkly’ gives pause. ‘My boob tube is sooo crinkly’, Emily said, smiling. Yes, you can’t hear crinkly without mentally smiling—and sounding like a six-year-old, and then laughing. ‘Daddy,
my chips are extremely crinkly.’
The earliest appearance in print is traced by the OED to 1826, and one J. Wilson, possibly the Scottish literary critic, and author, John Wilson.
I wish I knew how he deployed it in his sentence.
Probably not as an adjective modifying ‘boob tube’, the British English variant of ‘tube top’ (‘boob’ is BrE for breast), which arrives on the fashion scene 125 years later as American beachwear.
A glance at the ngram viewer, and the word seems to have been in decline in print for about a decade. However, chatgpt identified three novels coming out this year in which this cheeky little lexeme appears.
Because of the current and seemingly endless, violent global newsreel, ‘crinkly’ should become part of everyone’s personal lexicon, so we smile more. Not take the bullshit too seriously. Try it. Tomorrow morning, say the word to your children. They’ll repeat. And you can watch them smile when they say, ‘Crinkly.’
. . .
Seven words in English begin with ‘crinkl-’: crinkle, crinkly, crinkled, crinkling, crinklier (BrE), and crinkliest. Also the archaic compound crinkle-crankle, which is a variant of crinkum-crankum meaning ‘of elaborate detail’ and traced to the 17th century, eg., ‘Goodness, Margarate,’ I whispered, ‘isn’t her bodice crinkum-crankum!’
Readers in Suffolk, a county in the UK, may be familiar with the ‘crinkle-crankle’ walls that began to appear in the 1700s and when viewed from above, form wavy lines. (Sinusoidal walls can actually be traced back nearly three and a half thousand years to Aten in Egypt.) The name crinkle-crankle is said to derive from Suffolk dialect and may be the source of the Middle English variant of crinkum-crankum. (ME was spoken in England until around 1500.)
Although the meaning has evolved, our modern word crinkle is very old; hardly changed in its morphology in over a thousand years. According to MW11 at 296, crinkle comes from the ME crynkelen. This word is derived from the Old English (before 1066) crincan or cringan meaning ‘to yield’. MW11 lists the verb to crinkle as meaning ‘to form many short bends or ripples’; COED the noun a crinkle as, ‘a small crease or wrinkle’.
References:
Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 12th ed. (2011)
Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed. (2003)
