The Wall Street Journal on August 13, 2015,
displayed the following headline in its Business & Finance section: ‘U.S.
Farms Lack Help, Crimping Production.’ What does ‘crimping’ mean?
The Merriam-Webster
Dictionary defines ‘crimping’ as a verb meaning ‘to cause to become wavy, bent,
or pinched’ or ‘to pinch or press together.’ It reminds me of the 1980s when
women (me included) used to crimp their hair in order to make straight hair
look wavy. In reality, the heat from the crimping irons (like curling irons but
with serrated edges) singed the hair making it look rather frightful.
There is another
meaning for crimping. It also means ‘to be an inhibiting or restraining
influence on.’ The last definition of crimping is similar to cramping – i.e. to
be restrictive. So what does crimping have to do with farm production?
The article explains
in the first sentence that ‘last year, about a quarter of Biringer Farm’s
strawberries and raspberries rotted in the field because it couldn’t find
enough workers.’ The article says that worker shortages in America are caused
by a decline in illegal immigration from Mexico (previously the pool of
workers), a strengthened American economy which has enabled people to find less
back-breaking work, poor working conditions for farm labourers, delays in visas
for seasonal workers, and delays in arrivals of legal farm labourers into
America. The decline in workers is ‘reducing fruit and vegetable production by
9.5%, or $3.1 billion, a year.’
The difficulty in
hiring farm workers is indeed reducing farm productivity and therefore the lack
of workers is in fact an ‘inhibiting or restraining influence’ on farm
production.
Scorecard for The Wall
Street headline is 95% - the definition of crimping is reflected in the article,
but ‘crimping’ is not a common word that readers would readily recognize.
Cramping might have been a better choice. Crushing would have been even better.
Cramping, crushing, crunching, crippling, corroding, pinching, squeezing, shrinking …
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