Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

Hah!   Children they have on these boards!   Back in the day, a "can" wasn't always made of tin or steel.   "Canning" is the process of preserving food by a particular method (boiling it and then locking it away in air-tight containers); nowadays we think of a "can" as being a metal cylinder because they're cheaper (and therefore have become more common) in the industrial process, that's all.

...I often find it useful to answer first and then look it up.   It's frequently good for my humility, and I learn things I might not learn if I did it in the other order.   So it is today:   The Online Etymology Dictionary, I now see, says a can as a cup or container dates 'way back to old Germanic languages and may have come from Latin originally, but the "modern 'air-tight vessel of tinned iron' is from 1867" and (here's the point) "the verb meaning 'to put up in cans' is attested from 1871".   That means I'm probably wrong:   "Can" became a verb after cans were made of metal.

So were we preserving food in glass jars with screw tops before metal cans came along, but we didn't call it "canning" until later?   Or was the first canning done with metal cans, and home preservers began using Mason jars only more recently?   Now I don't know.   Someone do some research; I hafta get some work done this weekend.