Kieva has taken issue with the idea that corn is the common grain of the place, pointing out that is chiefly a british defination-- making the point, that even simple words like corn could cause confusion between american readers and british! as CK points out, during the famine, importing and exporting grain from ireland was regulated by the Corn Laws-- and there is no one corn in the UK, since as Samuel Johnson noted-- Oats are something that are fed to horse in England, but feed the people in Scotland...

Corn meanwhile goes back to:
ENTRY:          g-no
DEFINITION:  Grain. Oldest form *-no-, becoming *g-no- in centum languages. 
                   1a. corn1, from Old English corn, grain; b. kernel, from Old English 
                   derivative noun cyrnel, seed, pip; c. einkorn, from Old High German 
                   korn, grain. a–c all from Germanic *kornam. 2. garner, garnet, grain,
                  gram2, granadilla, granary, grange, grani-, granita, granite, granule,
                  grenade, grenadine; filigree, grosgrain, pomegranate, from Latin
                  grnum, grain. (In Pokorny er- 390.)

(from Bartleby's too)

and bingley's points out the pigs in question are ignots-- which makes perfect sense now that i think about it, but i have only heard of pig iron which was the raw iron an a black smith might buy as stock-- and use to form into what ever. Black smiths where not smelters.. they didn't extract the iron from the ore, they just worked pig iron that they purchased. i thought of bringing it up a few weeks ago, when we had our pig/boar/sow, etc.. thread but it seems to way off tangent--but its nice to see it coming up here..
any know why its pig iron?


my other obsession