Do the British say corn or maize?

[koganbot]

Posted this on Freaky Trigger:

I am here to report that it took me till age 59 to notice that invalid ("being without foundation or force in fact, truth, or law; logically inconsequent") and invalid ("suffering from disease or disability; sickly; of, relating to, or suited to one that is sick") are both spelled the same.

The only rhyming word that Merriam Webster could unearth is "corn salad."

Do the British say "corn" or "maize"?

British recipes maize = About 20,300,000 results (0.39 seconds); British recipes corn = About 1,560,000 results (0.32 seconds). But the first hit on each is Cooks.com English Pea Corn Salad, whose first link is Shoe Peg Corn Salad. First hit when I Google boot heel corn salad is "Missouri's Bootheel Region is Fertile Ground." First hit when I Google yummy shoe tree dessert is "Vidal, California: Shoe Tree - Gone," but I believe that Google believed that I actually meant "desert." Here are photos. Hot boot polish sundae gets us arts and crafts projects where sundae and shoe polish are different items, the former only linked. No boot mentioned, so Google lied.

Comments

[koganbot]

Both invalids have the same derivation, "validus" being Latin for "strong, effective." But, at least in the USA, the pronunciations are different, the logically inconsequent invalid pronounced "in-VAL-id" ("val" rhymes with "pal," not "pall") and the sickly invalid pronounced "IN-vuh-lid."

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

Google is entirely too free with synonyms, though putting a single word in quotes seems to work to specify "Yes I actually mean that one".

The British say corn - it took me a long time to realise that what I read of maize (usually in the context of native americans) was the same thing.

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

It is a bit more complex than that. If you asked a farmer growing maize he'd say maize, not corn. Also, cornfield generally means field full of wheat or barley.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Adam Smith writes corn, as differentiated from oats. But maize/corn is a New World crop, so whatever the English called corn before the 1500s or so wasn't maize.

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

By corn, Adam Smith meant wheat. Corn as a synonym for maize is fairly recent in British English.

[koganbot]

Thanks. This is fascinating. In the USA, the word "maize" basically doesn't exist, despite its New World origin (was a Taino word [language spoken by the Taino subgroup of Arawaks, the Tainos inhabiting most of the Caribbean islands at the time of the Spanish invasion], "mahiz," that became the Spanish "maize"). So a "cornfield" in the U.S. is a field of maize.

Meanwhile, apparently, the British "corn," which goes back to Old English and means or meant (according to my American Heritage Dictionary), "any of several cereal plants producing edible seed, such as wheat, rye, oats, or barley" and "the seeds of such a plant or crop; grain," evolved in the USA to mean only what elsewhere was called "maize." Merriam Webster has the British use as "the grain of a cereal grass that is the primary crop of a region (as wheat in Britain and oats in Scotland and Ireland); also: a plant that produces corn." So I can see how, in North America, where maize was primary, it was the corn i.e. grain of that particular region (though I don't know enough about agriculture to know if in North America there are areas that are better for maize than for wheat; I believe maize is way more common than wheat in Mexico and Central America, but this is not an informed belief). Presumably at some point there was a collision between the cultivation of maize and the cultivation of wheat, rye, oats, and barley, with maize getting the category word "corn" affixed to it while the other cereal grains were each individuated by their respective names, "corn" losing its broad categorical usage. (I suppose one could look up the derivation of the name of each cereal grain to see if it's old or relatively recent, and whether what it designates has wandered over the years.)

I assume "corn" for "maize" in British cuisine is a borrowing from North America. (The Canada Space dictionary is giving the same usage of "corn" as in the U.S.)

in a hole in the ground there lived a cobbett

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

One of the great popularisers of sweetcorn in the UK -- to be eaten on the cob, or milled for flour -- was the farmer and militant reformer William Cobbett (who had spent time in the US farming). His pamphlet -- the widely read Political Register -- attacked the powerful and the corrupt, but also hymned various foodstuffs

"In 1820, he stood for Parliament in Coventry, but finished bottom of the poll. That year he also established a plant nursery at Kensington, where he grew many North American trees, such as the black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) and a variety of maize, which he called ‘Cobbett’s corn’.[2] Cobbett and his son tried a dwarf strain of maize they had found growing in a French cottage garden and found it grew well in England’s shorter summer. To help sell this variety, Corbett published a book titled, A Treatise on Cobbett’s Corn (1828).[2] Meanwhile, he also wrote the popular book Cottage Economy (1822), which taught the cottager some of the skills necessary to be self-sufficient, such as instructions on how to make bread, brew beer, and keep livestock..."

[koganbot]

in North America, where maize was primary

Unintentionally ambiguous. I don't mean that maize was primary throughout all of North America. I should have written, "In the parts of North America where maize was primary,"