Dot Wordsworth

The cereal ambiguity of ‘corn’

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issue 10 September 2022

‘Wha, wha?’ said my husband in a slack-jawed way, throwing over a copy of the Guardian, as though it was my fault. ‘“Today,” it said, “just three crops – rice, wheat and corn – provide nearly half of the world’s calories.”’ I saw the problem. It was obvious, from a process of elimination, that by corn it meant ‘maize’.

Elsewhere ambiguities abound. Since the Ukraine war began, discussion of wheat and maize has increased no end, but it is often impossible to tell whether wheat or maize is meant by corn.

I thought we had agreed to differ with America on this. ‘As a general term the word corn includes all the cereals, wheat, rye, barley, oats, maize, rice, etc,’ the Oxford English Dictionary remarks chattily in an entry not fully updated since 1893. ‘Locally, the word, when not otherwise qualified, is often understood to denote that kind of cereal which is the leading crop of the district; hence in the greater part of England corn = wheat, in North Britain and Ireland = oats; in the United States the word, as short for Indian corn, is restricted to maize.

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