Tasty idioms

What Does Acknowledging The Corn Mean? 10 Food Expressions Explained

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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.

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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."

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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?

SURPRISE HAPPENS

Did You Know These 10 Epic Underdog Wins?

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No victory tastes better than an elusive one. Be it in the realm of sports, everyday life, work, or anywhere else, the achievement that took effort is more appreciated than the one that comes easy.

The team that is expected to lose a competition is called the underdog. For several possible reasons, the odds are stacked against this participant and not much is expected from them. This is why an underdog victory, in true David and Goliath style (ideally not deadly, though), is always surprising and often welcomed. Below are ten examples of this peculiar situation. Did you know about them?

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In the 2007 Super Bowl, the Patriots were a clear favorite: undefeated with a 16-0 record during the regular season and numerous offensive scoring records. The Giants came into the playoffs with a 10-6 record, as a wild card team.

Until the fourth quarter, the two teams only scored a combined 10 points. But that was when things changed unexpectedly. A series of unbelievable plays by the Patriots ended with the winning touchdown by Plaxico Burress that gave the Giants a 17-14 victory. The Giants won the Super Bowl and kept the Patriots from having a truly undefeated season.

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If you ever wondered what 5000-1 odds look like, you can go back to the unbelievable victory achieved by Leicester City in the 2014-2015 Premier League championship.

The modest club that had been lucky to remain in that very league during the previous season, took advantage of down years for the big teams like Manchester United, Chelsea, Manchester City, and Arsenal to become the most unlikely champions in English football.

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Winning a Wimbledon Championship at 17 years old? Check! That is if you are Boris Becker. In the build-up to the 1985 Wimbledon Championships, the 17-year-old German focused his preparations at Queens Club. When he won the warm-up event, commentators declared him a ‘future Wimbledon champion’ – little did they know they’d be proven right three weeks later in the tennis tournament of the summer.

As the tournament progressed and both John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors succumbed to the big-serving South African Kevin Curren, the improbable started to look increasingly likely.

Curren was still the strong favorite when the pair met in the final, but Becker played with a confidence beyond his years and beat the odds.

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Granted, Niki Lauda was no underdog. He was born into a wealthy family in Austria, and at the height of his career, he drove for Ferrari. But, what makes his story so interesting is the fact that he came back from a terrible accident at the Nürburgring in 1976, when he became trapped in his car and suffered very severe burns.

After experiencing those injuries, he returned to the track just six weeks later, appearing at Monza with his burns still bandaged, and only lost the 1976 championship by a point to James Hunt after retiring from the Japanese Grand Prix due to unsafe conditions.

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Ronda "Rowdy" Rousey was not supposed to lose her UFC bantamweight title in her match against Holly Holm. She was at the top of her game and had dominated her last three fights, winning them in 34, 16, and 14 seconds, and positioning her as the heavy favorite.

But the boxing specialist Holm dismissed all that, as she neutralized Rousey's peerless grappling skill and knocked out the favorite with a brutal second-round kick.

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Betting on a team that had won 10 of the last 12 pennants coming into the 1960 World Series would have seemed like a pretty sure thing, right? Think again.

The New York Yankees were the clear favorites but the Pittsburgh Pirates' Bill Mazeroski hit one of the most famous home runs in MLB baseball history in Game 7 and took the championship home.

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The legendary Roger Federer intended to win his sixth consecutive US Open championship in New York and it seemed like a very possible thing for the Swiss to achieve. But things did not go according to plan when the tall Argentine Juan Martin del Potro, the No. 6 seed, managed to upset the then-world No. 1.

Del Potro forced the winner to play five sets before taking the fifth 6-2. Given that Del Potro defeated Federer and never won another major title, this result has never ceased to amaze.

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Being an unknown player in a high-profile tournament is not the kind of thing that makes you an instant favorite, and not even being expected to play adds another layer of uncertainty. John Daly found himself in that very predicament going into the 1991 USPGA Championship.

As it happened, Nick Price withdrew to be at the birth of his first child. And eight players on the alternates list could not get to Crooked Stick, Indianapolis to replace Price. But the ninth reserve got in his car, drove through the night, and arrived there on Thursday ready to play.

Daly became an instant crowd favorite and with their backing went on to defy odds of 1000-1 to win the major.

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And a miracle it was. At least for the audience who might not have been aware of the hard work that led to such an epic victory. The United States men’s Olympic hockey team was not exactly poised to defeat the mighty Soviet hockey machine at the 1980 Winter Olympics Ice Hockey final in Lake Placid. But it did.

The Soviet team had dominated for years, and even the most hopeful wondered if the United States would even score in the game, let alone win. Instead, Team USA pulled off an amazing upset, winning the game 4-3 and earning themselves a place in history.

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Living up to your nickname can be hard if it is "The Greatest". But that was not the case for the legendary boxer, Muhammad Ali, who regained his heavyweight title after three years of exile.

The road was not a direct path to glory as, upon his return, he lost to Joe Frazier and Ken Norton. But the unthinkable (for most) happened after that when he beat the fearsome George Foreman who had dismantled Norton and Frazier both inside two brutal rounds.

Ali’s tactics in the "Rumble in the Jungle" saw him knock out an exhausted Foreman in the eighth round and win back the heavyweight title at the ripe age of 32.