Tasty idioms

What Does Acknowledging The Corn Mean? 10 Food Expressions Explained

Image: Mae Mu

Food idioms have a way of adding flavor to our speech. From "crying over spilled milk" to being accused of "being a couch potato," we have internalized these phrases and no longer notice their edible main characters. What are the origins of these funny lines? Did their meanings evolve over the centuries? Grab a snack and read on to learn the history of food-related idioms that have seasoned our language since as early as 77 A.D.

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You can go ahead and imagine someone trying to staple or nail jelly to the bark. This line applies to tasks that are either challenging or impossible. One of its earliest uses is believed to have been by President Theodore Roosevelt. Legend has it that, over inconclusive talks about the building of the Panama Canal, he said: "Negotiating with those pirates is like trying to nail currant jelly to the wall."

Similar hyperbolic idioms suggest that someone attempting the impossible is trying to "catch the wind" or "herding cats." Also, it may refer to projects that are as difficult as they are useless, just like nailing jelly to a tree.

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Of the list, this is the most modern idiom. It gained popularity in the 2010s via jokes on the internet and social media culture. In a world where tea equals gossip, "spilling the tea", "bringing the tea", or "serving the tea" means to provide juicy, exclusive details about a story. It derives from the shorthand for "Truth": a capital "T". While it’s too soon for the expression to be in every dictionary, the slang is widespread enough to be understood in several countries.

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This saying is recent enough to have a known author. In the 1970s, a man called Tom Iacino improvised this term in a phone call to refer to his lazy friend. From then on, Tom and his close ones adopted the words to laugh about their sedentary habits. The expression soon became used in cartoons and TV shows, and eventually caught on. In an interview many years later, Tom said he couldn’t explain why he had come up with that silly image back then.

Image: Noemí Jiménez

Here’s another idiom that stuck because of the humor in the image it paints. Have you ever stopped to picture someone on the floor, crying over spilled milk? Melodramatic, right? The reason the phrase caught on since early mentions in 17th-century English literature is the mockery implied in it. When someone is told not to cry over spilled milk, they are being consoled by the fact that their mishap is rather irrelevant. It also points out that, however minor, their mistake can’t be undone, like putting the milk back in the jar.

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To be or not to be in a pickle! It was William Shakespeare himself who first penned this idiom in his play The Tempest. He intended it with a different meaning than simply being in trouble, though. In the play, a shipwreck strands two characters on an island with nothing but a barrel of wine. It is their king who finds them later and asks Trinculo, one of them: "How came’st thou in this pickle?," because, by that point, Trinculo is drunk.

Fifty years after Shakespeare’s play, another writer, Samuel Pepys, used the phrase to describe a messy, bothersome, problematic situation. This is the version that stuck through the centuries.

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A baker’s dozen equals 13. Here’s the logic behind that. In medieval England, bakers were subject to strict regulations and often received fines or floggings for shortchanging customers. When you are baking 300 loaves a day in a medieval oven, it is possible that some of them might come out undersized. To avoid conflicts in weighing and counting, bakers adopted the habit of including one or even two extra items in each dozen they sold. This practice was so widespread that by the 16th century, the expression "baker’s dozen" had become a standard term to mean 13.

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The suggestion to "take it with a grain of salt" has ancient origins. It is believed to come from a natural medicine bible written around 77 AD, Pliny the Elder's Naturalis Historia. In it, Pliny recounted a story about the Roman general Pompey, who discovered an antidote for poison that included a grain of salt. This antidote was thought to make one immune to poison if taken regularly. In Classical Latin, Pliny’s words were addito salis grano ("after having added a grain of salt").

Over time, the concept became a metaphor for skepticism. With it, people are advised not to believe everything they hear. Just as a grain of salt could mitigate naïveté.

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We can all agree that pre-sliced bread is a major convenience. Back in the 1920s, when the first automatic bread slicer was invented, sliced bread started being sold under the brand name "Wonder Bread". Their ads read: "The greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped." After that, popularly, people started to admire new, helpful, or groundbreaking inventions as "the greatest thing since sliced bread".

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To "confess the corn", to "own the corn", or even to "acknowledge the malt" all refer to the act of admitting to at least part of the guilt of some crime. According to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrases and Fable, this one originated in a Congressional debate of 1828. The fable goes that one of the states had previously claimed to be a corn exporter. Representatives then admitted that they exported hogs who had eaten corn, which was exported in that way.

A funnier version sustains that it was first said in a court case in the 19th century, in which a man was accused of stealing horses and a large supply of corn. It is said that aiming to be dismissed from the charge and the terrible penalty for horse thieves, he stood and declared: "I acknowledge the corn."

Image: American Heritage Chocolate

What’s the point of having a cake and not being able to eat it? The explanation behind this idiom is that, once you have a cake, you can either store it or eat it (and cease to have it). So, the phrase describes the situation of wanting two mutually exclusive things.

The first historical record of this line appears in print in John Heywood's Proverbs (1546). Back then, cake was considered a luxury item. However, the idiom is timeless because it describes internal conflicts that we all have at some point. Should I watch another episode or get some sleep? Have the cake, or eat it?

The universe revealed

Did you know that the moon is upside down in the southern hemisphere?

Did you know that everything we know about the universe makes up only about 5% of it? Even so, there’s still much that might surprise you. On some planets, a year is shorter than a day, while on others it can literally rain diamonds. From the smell of comets to the color of Mars’ sunsets, here are 10 incredible facts about the universe you probably didn’t know.

Perhaps if the Weather Girls had been born on Neptune or Uranus, their famous hit might have had a very different title, because something extraordinary may happen on these planets: it can rain diamonds! The immense pressures in their atmospheres can compress carbon into diamond crystals, which then sink deeper into the planets’ interiors.

If you are reading this at night, step out into your backyard and take a look at the Moon. While we often assume everyone sees the Moon the same way, that’s not true. In fact, the Moon appears "upside down" in the Southern Hemisphere. This happens because your perspective changes relative to the Moon: in the Northern Hemisphere, you’re viewing it from "above" the equator, while in the Southern Hemisphere, observers see it from "below."

Saturn, the second-largest planet in our solar system, has a diameter of about 74,897 miles, making it roughly nine times wider than Earth. Surprisingly, it’s theoretically possible for Saturn to float on water... if only you could find an ocean big enough! This isn’t because of its size, but because of its composition: the planet is mostly made of hydrogen and helium, extremely light gases that make Saturn less dense than water.

Remember that time you got distracted and the steak on the stove got a little burnt? Surprisingly, the smell in your kitchen isn’t too different from what astronauts report after spacewalks. Scientists have noticed that objects returning from space, especially those exposed to the vacuum outside the spacecraft, carry a distinctive odor often described as burnt steak or welding fumes.

It takes Earth about 365 days to orbit the Sun, which is why our year is that long. A day, on the other hand, lasts just 24 hours because that’s how long it takes Earth to complete one full rotation on its axis. But on Venus, things work very differently. A single day on Venus (the time it takes to rotate once on its axis) is about 243 Earth days, making its rotation extremely slow. Surprisingly, a year on Venus is shorter than its day, because it only takes about 225 Earth days for Venus to orbit the Sun. Incredible, isn’t it?

Since we see the Moon in the sky nearly every night, it’s easy to forget that it’s a giant rock floating far away in space. In fact, the distance between Earth and the Moon is about 238,900 miles, so vast that, in theory, you could line up all the other planets in our solar system across that gap!

Mars is famously called the "Red Planet" because its surface is covered in iron oxide (rust), giving it a reddish appearance from afar. But if you were standing on Mars at sunset, you’d get a surprise: unlike Earth’s warm orange, gold, and pink hues, Martian sunsets appear blue. This happens because the planet’s thin, dusty atmosphere scatters sunlight differently, allowing blue light to dominate near the Sun at sunset.

Comets, made of ice, dust, and frozen gases, are truly spectacular to see. But if you could smell them, they might not be so pleasant. As a comet nears the Sun, its ices sublimate, turning directly from solid to gas and releasing various compounds. Among these are sulfur-containing gases, which give off a strong rotten-egg smell.

Scientists can estimate the number of stars in the universe using observations and projections. Astronomers observe a small patch of the sky, count the galaxies and stars there, and then extrapolate those numbers to the entire observable universe. While Earth has an incredible number of sand grains, these calculations suggest that there are far more stars than grains of sand. If you're not impressed yet, remember that many of those stars are much larger than any planet!

If the last fact shocked you, this one will totally blow your mind. While our galaxy has far fewer stars than the entire observable universe, you might be surprised to learn that trees on Earth actually outnumber the stars in the Milky Way. That’s right! Scientists estimate there are roughly 3 trillion trees on our planet, while the Milky Way contains only about 100 to 400 billion stars.