the.com/corn
a grass that domesticated humans as much as we ever domesticated it
means A cereal grass grown for its edible kernels — meaning maize in North America, but wheat in England and oats in Scotland, depending on where you're standing.
from From Old English 'corn,' meaning grain or a seed, with deep roots running back through Germanic to a Proto-Indo-European source 'gre-no-' (a worn-down grain or kernel) — making it a distant cousin of Latin 'granum' and English 'grain' and 'kernel.' For most of its life 'corn' meant simply 'the leading grain of the place.' When English speakers reached the Americas and met maize, they called it 'Indian corn,' which Americans eventually shortened to plain 'corn' — so the word quietly changed crops mid-Atlantic.
- can't self-seed
- corn dies without humans to plant it
- ancestor
- descended from a scrawny grass called teosinte
- in everything
- sweetens soda, fuels cars, feeds livestock
- even rows
- every cob has an even number of rows
- silk count
- each silk strand connects to one kernel
corn belt — iowa, illinois, indiana produce 30% of us corn supply
corn palace — building in mitchell, south dakota decorated with 275,000 bushels of corn annually