Powhatan Creek Trail
Curious about why we call corn "ears"? Well, so was I. So I looked it up. Here is some of what I found from Grammaphobia:
The “ear” of corn that we eat in summer and the “ear” that we hear with are unrelated. Yes, these are two separate and distinct words, both of which have been with us since Anglo-Saxon days and have different prehistoric roots.
In Old English, Middle English, and Modern English, the word “ear” has been used to mean a spike or head of grain. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “the part of a cereal plant which contains its flowers or seeds.”
Here’s a typical citation from the OED: “The ripen’d Grain, whose bending Ears Invite the Reaper’s Hand” (from a 1740 poem by William Somerville).
This spiky agricultural “ear” is descended from an ancient Indo-European root that’s been reconstructed as ak (“sharp”). It became the Proto-Germanic akhuz, which eventually gave us the Old English word ear around the year 800.
Las he visto más de una vez, por los campos de mi tierra.
ReplyDeleteQue tengas un buen domingo de descanso.
Interesting.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing, I never knew that.
ReplyDeleteThanks.
ReplyDeleteNow I know something!!
ReplyDeleteI often wondered why it was called an ear.
ReplyDelete