Maize to Corn: The enslavement of nature
In her amazing (wink) article on the translation of the name the Arawak Indians gave their staple (mahiz), Betty Fussel (“Translating maize into corn: The transformation of America’s native grain” Social Research: Spring 1999; Vol. 66, No. 1 ) traces the fascinating and instructive journey of Zea mays from semi-divine grain to industrial petro-chemical source.
How is it that we call corn “corn” and not “maize?” And what does that tell us about our attitudes toward it?
In Taino (the language of the Arawak Indians) “maize” meant “life giving seed.” But as the grain spread throughout Europe each people seemed to not know what to call it and so ended up calling it by a generic or denigrating term. Thus the Spaniards called it panizo—the generic term for the grains they knew. In Turkish it became kukuruz which meant barbarian. In 1536 a Parisian botanist dubbed it Turcicum frumentum, which the British translated as turkey wheat, which wasn’t a reference to the place of its origins but rather to its barbaric nature. My mother grew up in Germany during WWII and even in that time (and place) “Turk” and “Hun” were curse words—a long hold over from the times when the Germanic tribes (themselves at one time considered barbarians) were settled and then plagued by the supposedly barbarous Mongol tribes. And so maize as the grain of the barbarian, the Indian, the uncivilized did not deserve a name of meaning but only a bare recognition with the generic term corn. When I was a child, we at it at picnics, but I remember the stories my father told from the farm how corn was mostly food for pigs. And this is true that we still turn corn into pigs and cattle.
The word corn has its roots (as most short words in English do) in the Old Germanic, specifically in the rune-grn from which sprouts our modern English words corn (generic for any grain of edible grass), kernel (small grains) and grit (tough small grain), from which one can assemble the perfectly sensible but linguistically farcical statement: “Grits are ground from kernels of corn grain.”
Carolus Linnaeus was on the right track in trying to standardize the naming of the grain dubbing it Zea mays. Zea is Greek for “life-giving.” So, in the scientific name we have the well intentioned, if ignorant, name “Life-giving life-giving seed.”
For ancient and contemporary indigenous Americans maize was certainly a gift of the divine and perhaps divine itself. A thousand years before the birth of Christ, the Olmec articulated a complete universe—a language, calendar, mythos, and cosmos—on the life and nature of maize. For contemporary pan-American “modern” society corn is at best considered a picnic food and at worst has become yet another pawn in the industrial food game. Fussell quotes the National Corn Growers Association—“Anything made from a barrel of petroleum can be made from corn.” And, indeed, corn products can be found in things like rubber tires and insecticides, and, of course, nearly every packaged and sweetened beverage on the grocery store shelf.
Perhaps if we, in the vernacular, referred to corn, not as “generic cereal grain” but as something we knew as “life-giving”, we wouldn’t have allowed what was sacred to the Amerindians and meso-Americans to become a commodity. The journey of maize to corn is a good lesson for us to not only be mindful of the language we use, but to know the often surprising origins and subtle meanings of the words of our own languages.
Here you can read Ms Fussell’s article.
Or, you can read more about the origins of maize.
Next week…the potato… ; )
With a wink,
Tim and the rest of the Dirt! Gang Spreading Roots, Spring Forth