Huckleberry Finn, the protagonist in the Mark Twain/Samuel Clemens novel of the same name, smoked corn silk in a cob in the book. I don't know how Huck got anything out of corn silk, but I suspect it moved millions of young boys and likely girls to give it a try. Huck was an extremely smart but dirt poor child who never attended school regularly. He was a truth finder and a truth teller, and although he was ashamed of some of what he found, he never hesitated to tell. Clemens "heard" the Huck voice from an actual child, a little riverfront vagrant who spoke a deep Missouri dialect and noticed everything. Once in Clemens' head, the voice never let go. Hemingway acknowledged Huck as the beginning of modern American fiction, and it was probably a foundation of contemporary common speech as well.
