Since 2017, our post, Corn night: St. Peter's forgotten tradition?, has been a citation in the Quarterly Update 10, Fall 2017 of the Dictionary of American Regional English for the noun phrase, "corn night."
As a poor country blogger, we're might proud of this.
The Quarterly Update 10 notes:
Quarterly Update 10 starts the new year off with a bang with the fine old tradition of an anvil salute. Take two anvils and a pound of gunpowder. . .—what could go wrong? Plenty, it turns out, as the quotations for this and the related entries make clear. Please don’t try this at home! And if that’s not enough mischief, this update also includes not only mischief night, but also a whole raft of synonyms and terms for more specialized nights, like doorbell night and corn night.
As for "corn night":
corn night n chiefly N Midl; also Appalachians Cf corn v 4, mischief night n
A night near, usu before, Halloween, when children fling dried corn against houses and sometimes play other pranks.
Bluestem is the last citation in a strong that begins with the Wellington [Ohio] Enterprise in 1882.
H/t to Eric Olmanson who commented with the link on a high school friend's Facebook post. She had written about the fun:
. . . It was always good silly fun. Throw the corn and run away before you can be seen. Local police officers were out on patrol on Corn Night but seemed to get a kick out of it and were more a presence to keep things from getting out of hand. I never remember anything bigger happening. I remember dark nights with a chill in the air, running with friends crisscrossing town and laughing. Calling out to others you’d meet. It felt scandalous and sneaky and for one night between being a little kid and a teenager, the “big kids” got to own the town.
Photo: A handful of field corn.
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