_Shuck_, however, is much more widely used than _husk_ in colloquial speech--the farmers in more than half of the United States are hardly acquainted with the word _husk_ as applied to the envelope of the ear.

_Husk_, in the Middle States, and in some parts of the South and West, means the bran of the cornmeal, as notably in Davy Crockett's verse: "She sifted the meal, she gimme the hus'; She baked the bread, she gimme the crus'; She b'iled the meat, she gimme the bone; She gimme a kick and sent me home." In parts of Virginia, before the war, the word _husk_ or _hus'_ meant the cob or spike of the corn.

"I smack you over wid a cawn-hus'" is a threat I have often heard one negro boy make to another.

_Cob_ is provincial English for ear, and I have known "a cob of corn" used in Canada for an ear of Indian corn.

While writing this note "a cob of Indian corn "-- meaning an ear--appears in the report of an address by a distinguished man at a recent meeting of the Royal Geographical Society.
A lady tells me that she met, in the book of an English traveller, the remarkable statement that "the Americans are very fond of the young grain called cob." These Indian-corn words have reached an accepted meaning after a competition.