Corn is confusing, meaning different things in different places. Maize, on the other hand, is unambiguous, referring to the same thing wherever you are from.
I'm surprised this hasn't been suggested before...
Updated by Hillside Moose
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Corn is confusing, meaning different things in different places. Maize, on the other hand, is unambiguous, referring to the same thing wherever you are from.
I'm surprised this hasn't been suggested before...
Updated by Hillside Moose
I was referring to the fact that "corn" refers to cereal crops in general. The reason why Americans came to call maize "corn" is through the term "Indian corn" - ie. the corn grown by American Indians. "Corn" itself refers equally to wheat, barley, oats etc.
Because this site uses American English, though, it uses "corn" to refer specifically to maize, thus causing potential confusion. Given that maize is perfectly good in American English as well as British English, with no potential confusion, it makes sense to move the tag across, yes?
I've walked across or along hundreds or even thousands of fields of corn in my life, but don't think I've ever crossed one which was growing maize.
Updated
If you're arguing that the term is ambiguous, then it doesn't make sense to propose what you consider an ambiguous general term be aliased over to a specific term. As far as I see it, if you accept the alias, then you're accepting that corn only has one meaning, which brings to question the proposed alias to begin with. The only way it wouldn't be confusing would be if you proposed converting Corn into just a wiki that directed to other tags.
Maize also isn't really "perfectly good American English", it's not in regular use and it is also used to mean a different thing. Specifically in American English it is used to refer to multicolored Indian Corn.
When it comes to resulting in confusion, while I can't deny bias, I would prefer to stick to using American English terminology. While it is common to lump "World" English with UK English, other English speaking parts of the world will have their own specific meanings for words (including Corn) that will differ from say the UK, so using UK English isn't going to really unify things and I'd rather stick to what was already established.
edit- Although if you're still going to push for a term, most images could fall under terms like corn_on_the_cob, ear_of_corn, or sweet_corn and remove the ambiguity and still keep the word corn in the naming. It may be desirable to differentiate the plant and the ear.
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kuuderes_shadow said:
The reason why Americans came to call maize "corn" is through the term "Indian corn" - ie. the corn grown by American Indians. "Corn" itself refers equally to wheat, barley, oats etc.
That was centuries ago. Corn now only refers to the maize crop here in America. I would rather reverse the alias to be honest.
The reason I proposed the alias from corn -> maize rather than the other way around is that if someone types in "corn", referring to something other than maize, they can see the alias to maize and it's immediately obvious to them that this isn't what they want.
Anyone typing in maize will be meaning maize (Indian Corn being a variety of maize, after all) so the other way around doesn't work so well.
There are images tagged with corn that appear to be other cereal crops (eg. post #2289474) and if the alias went maize -> corn instead then the alias would do nothing to prevent this.
It would still be better than the current situation, though - this was triggered, after all, by my trying to enter "maize" as a tag and finding nothing, then "sweetcorn" and likewise finding nothing.
I personally would be willing to support corn being turned into a disambiguation wiki page, but I know that it would probably be flooded with stuff related to maize anyway.
Regarding separating out sweetcorn/corn on the cob (if this is done then one of these should be aliased to the other) from the plant, that's not particularly what the thread was about but I'd be okay with that happening as well. Only thing - is there any precedence for this? Even rice doesn't have it except with regards to rice vs. rice_paddy. There's corn field but there are more images in there that refer to non-maize grass crops than refer to maize, so that does nothing to resolve the problem.
One way to think about it is that if you mass edited corn -> maize instead of aliasing it, then there would probably be a relatively large number of future posts that would end up with the "corn" tag anyway due to people just using the word regularly, which speaks against changing it.
I can see that way isn't going to get anywhere, even though it's imo by far the best option.
How about this one then. No objections here?
The bulk update request #876 has been approved.
I can't imagine thinking of corn as meaning corn-on-the-cob. Corn is the dominant grain: wheat here and most of Europe, oats in Scotland, maize in America, barley where grown.
Americans didn't even assume Corn was solely maize until the 1790s; before then it meant wheat, maize, whatever, to them.
This was covered already.
Either way, American English is the standard here. Unfortunately for our friends across the Atlantic, maize is corn, trousers are pants, and football is soccer.
Locking thread.