Americans call it corn. Hardly anybody else does. To most of the world, corn is maize, a word from the Taíno mahiz (as transcribed by Columbus) and Latinized to mays in the scientific binomial for the plant, Zea mays. Mahiz means “life-giving seed.” Linnaeus might have been a bit redundant with the Greek zea, which also means “life-giving,” but then maize was fundamental to the diet and cultures of the Americas. It literally was life-giving and civilization-building.
In the mid 1970s, Mazola corn-oil margarine started being advertised on television with the tagline “You call it corn. We call it maize.” The line lived long enough to be remembered by young Bart Simpson in a pinch.
The “we” in the Mazola ads were supposed to be Indigenous Americans. The pitch aimed to unite nature, naturalness, and Native authenticity, arguably in response to the cultural and political ferment sparked by the American Indian Movement. But television ads aren’t a notably accurate source for cultural or culinary or any other kind of history. As corn maven Betty Fussell writes, when Columbus “discovered” maize in 1492, the plant was known by many words in some two thousand Indigenous American languages.
“Corn,” meanwhile, comes from the German korn, which in turn is rooted in the Proto-Germanic *kurnam, a grain or seed. This old usage can still be found in “corned beef,” in which the corn-ing agents are grains of salt. “Corn” and its regional European variants came to mean cereal grains. What was grown locally was what was called corn: wheat in England, oats in Scotland and Ireland, rye in Germany. (The infamous British Corn Laws of the nineteenth century, which strangled the poor and reinforced the power of landowners, aimed to control the import of wheat, oats, and barley; maize was considered animal food.)