Grammar Girl here. I'm In Yon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. Today, in honor of St. Patrick's Day, we're going to talk about why we refer to food as corned, as in corned beef. And then we'll talk about why some words

in English have accent marks. From the candy corn on Halloween to the dried corn at Thanksgiving

and even the corned beef on St. Patty's Day, corn seems to be everywhere during American holiday

celebrations. So what's up with all the corniness?

Well, it turns out that many of these corn-themed items come from an earlier meaning of the word corn itself.

You see, the word entered Old English from its Germanic ancestor as the word corn spelled with a K.

Now, for most of English's history, corn was used to refer to any hard seed particle,

not just that of maize. This is why English has the word peppercorn, for example.

Most often, though, it referred to whatever grain was the dominant one in the area.

So, for instance, rye, barley, wheat, or oats were common corn in Europe.

And although it may seem far afield from grain, as we call these cereal seeds today, both corn and grain actually come from the same root, which was grano, G-R-E-N-O.

This ancient word for grain or seeds existed in a now-extinct precursor language

that's thought to have given birth to the Germanic and italic lines of language several thousand years ago.

In the resulting Germanic branch from which English descended, sound changes made it into Old English as corn, while in the

italic derived Latin, it became Granum. Grunum then developed into the word grain as a branch of Latin turned into French.

From French it was borrowed into English around the 14th century, giving English both grain

and corn.

Of course, the question now is how a word which can still be used generically to refer

to any local grain in Britain became so much more specific in its use

in the United States. Well, the American habit of using the word corn to only refer to the yellow

cobbed starchy vegetable, otherwise known as maize, goes all the way back to the early settlers

in New England and Virginia. After arriving in the new back to the early settlers in New England and Virginia.

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