Chrysti M. Smith

Imagine investigating unknown territory without map or guide. As the point person, you make the first astounding discovery. A hundred-foot waterfall. A herd of tiny striped ungulates gathered around a lake. You call to your companions: wow, look at this!

The word was folded into English at least by 1420, when an early cookbook instructed readers how to “make stekys of venysoun or Beef.” Throughout the centuries, the word was spelled styke, steke, and steyke, arriving at its modern spelling steak by the mid 1600s.

For centuries, the traditional meal of Cornish tin miners was the pasty. Made daily by wives and mothers, pasties were the perfect portable meal: a miscellany of vegetables and meat encased and baked in a D-shaped pastry shell. 

Cast was first printed in an English document as long ago as 1230, borrowed from an Old Norse verb kasta, “to throw.” This original sense carries through in our modern phrases cast the first stone, cast a net, cast the dice.

But amidst the Olympian chaos and drama was a goddess who worked quietly on behalf of humanity: Hygiea, the Greek personification of good health. Hygiea learned the healing arts from her father, a powerful god of medicine.

Hike, it seems, has been very difficult to trace, with no apparent Latin, French, or Germanic ancestry. The Oxford English Dictionary tentatively suggests that hike may be related to another dialectal British word, hoick, meaning “to haul or turn out; to

Corn was a well-established English word for any type of edible grain such as wheat, rye, barley, and the like.  In this tradition, English speakers began calling the native maize “Indian Corn.”  In time, American colonists and their descendants adopted and adapted  “Indian Corn” preparations into such traditional dishes as corn pone, chowder, hominy, spoonbread, succotash, hush puppies.