etymologyorigin-unknownterminology
No, no, it is not what you think!
It is a poor fish called slippery dick:
The slippery dick, Halichoeres bivittatus, is a species of wrasse native to shallow, tropical waters of the western Atlantic Ocean.
So how on the earth this fish is named "slippery dick" in English?
What is the origin of this name?
Note: I'm afraid that the answer would be the obvious metaphoric connection.
Interesting question. I have three or so answers; I feel like my answer to kernel of corn is a bit weaker than that of wheat berry, but I guess you can be the judge of that.
Superstructures
The modern appearance of what we Americans know as corn (maize) is deceiving as to its history. As you may or may not know, maize is not a natural plant, and could not survive in the wild by itself -- it was originally domesticated by pre-Columbian Americans over the period of a 1000 or so years from its natural ancestor teosinte. It cannot reproduce in the wild, primarily because it has no good vector of reproduction; plants, being sessile creatures, and being intensely competitive for space, often have to adopt "natural" vectors to transport their seeds from their birthplace far and wide so their progeny have the best chance to survive. Most fruits, sugary and pleasant smelling, have adopted animals as their vector to transport their seeds; teosinte, and other grains of the grass family, adapted to drier, more arid locales, adopted wind as their method of seed dispersal.
Now, the first thing one has to do when domesticating a plant to perform human bidding is to isolate it from its wild brethren, so that they don't transmit their unwanted genes into the domesticate. Or, said another way, the pro-Columbian Americans who domesticated maize had to eliminate the dispersive abilities of teosinte, in order to select for bigger seeds that give maize is nutritive value. That in turn, meant they had to reduce or eliminate the superstructures of the teosinte seed that allowed it to better disperse and survive. I.e., domestication entailed the reduction of the protective seed coat that enveloped the fruit, to offer it less protection from the elements; and the strengthening of the rachis, normally brittle, that attaches the individual fruits attached to the cob. Well, OK, you say -- why does all this matter? The below image will make the point clearer.
Figure A is "modern" corn. Figure B is completely wild teosinte, and Figure C is teosinte with a maize gene introgressed into it. Figures G and H are maize with various teosinte genes introgressed into them. Do they make the kernel nature of maize clearer?
What I'm trying to show by including the above image is that during the time when western Europeans would have been introduced to maize, maize looked intermediate from what it looks like in Figure A and what it once looked like as wild teosinte in Figure B. Understandbly, the pre-Columbian Americans didn't understand genetics, didn't have modern breeding practices, and didn't have the techniques of The Green Revolution to perfect their staple. Humans have since engineered modern maize to be basically "all seed" and "no protection", but in the time of the pre-Columbian Americans, the seedcoat of fruit would have been much more apparent, and the rachis would have been thicker, like that of figure B's. The kernel nature of maize at the time would have been much more apparent.
Native Americans popped corn too
Being a member of the grass family, and adapted to arid environments, teosinte (and hence maize) seeds harden quickly once liberated from the stalk so as not give up excess moisture. The first teosinte seeds pre-Columbian Americans experimented with would scarcely have been edible. As a result, some archaeologists and anthropologists think, and have demonstrated in the lab, that the first Americans who set about domesticating teosinte originally popped its seeds to extract their nutritive value. If popcorn, and the inevitable hardened seeds associated with its making, were served to the first Westerners to experience maize, the kernel nature of the staple would also have immediately suggested itself.
Phew! On to your second question.
According to Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, p. 1424, a wheat berry is an "unprocessed whole kernel of wheat", and as a term it has been attested since 1848.
At first glance, viewed solely botanically, the name wheat berry is kind of puzzling, for the reasons you mention. But the problem is solved when one realizes that ordinary berries and wheat berries serve the same functional role in two immediately recognizable activities: regular berries dye clothes for the tailor, and wheat berries dye bread for the miller, when ground into flour as middlings. I quote from The Technics of Flour Milling: A Handbook for Millers (1904):
In dealing with wheats it is usually the custom to look at them from a point of view characteristic of some property which the sample under observation is mored noted for. For instance, English varieties are relied upon for colour and flavour more than strength, and in like manner many kinds of Russian samles for strength, without special regard to their qualities which they may or may not possess to any extent....the point to be here noted is this — that the two principal essentials are strength and colour...
In fact, this "berry"-like nature of grains was noted long before wheat berry came into its own. From The Encyclopedia Britannica, Volume 12:
The word "grains" was early used, also in French, of the small seed-like insects supposedly formerly to be of the berries of trees, from which a scarlet dye was extracted (see COCHINEAL and KERMES). From the Fr. en graine, literally in dye, comes the French verb engrainer, Eng. "engrain" or "ingrain", meaning to dye any fast colour.
In other words, the "berry"-like nature of some grains is where we get our verb ingrain -- meaning to impart some essential quality internally, like which does dye -- from! So in fact the name makes perfect sense.
Balance does not only mean that two sides are equal, but it can be the result of "balancing", meaning to compare all the items on one side to those on the other side.
In this case, your bank balance is the result of adding up all the incoming transactions, and deducting all the outgoing transactions.
The resulting balance may be positive or negative.
If you make up the balance of a project, you evaluate what went well, and what didn't, and you come to an overall conclusion about the project's success.
Best Answer
From The Christian Advocate (August 27, 1903), a publication of the Methodist Church in New York, excerpting an article from the New York Tribune:
From Herman Dorner, "Guide to the New York Aquarium" (1877):
And from Russell Coles, "Observations on the Habits and Distribution of Certain Fishes Taken on the Coast of North Carolina" (1910):
Neither the Methodist Church editor nor the two scholarly fish experts show any particular interest in the "dick" part of the name, focusing instead on the "slippery" component. Presumably that lack of interest reflects the fact that most early-twentieth-century Americans understood dick as simply an informal version of the common name Richard.
J.S. Farmer & W.E. Henley, Slang & Its Analogues (1891) report five contemporaneous slang meanings of dick, most of them fairly benign:
Evidently the military meaning was at that time not widely known to the general public. Hence, Farmer & Henley report, the following lively phrase had only one meaning:
Mentions of "slippery dick" as the name of the wrasse go back at least to John Jones, The Naturalist in Bermuda (1859), whereas the earliest date that J.E. Lighter, Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang (1994) finds for dick in the sense of "penis" is from 1888; on the other hand, dick in the sense of "a fellow, esp. if foolish or peculiar" goes back to 1553 and remained in occasional use in that sense throughout the nineteenth century, according to Lighter.
One appealing (but unlikely) source for the choice of "dick" as part of its name may be the fortuitous notoriety of a famously well-greased member of Boss Tweed's Tammany Hall ring in New York City, Richard B. Connolly. An uncharitable appraisal of Mr. Connolly in The Life of Col. James Fisk, Jr. "The Prince of Erie." of Miss Helen Josephine Mansfield, "The Erie Princess." of Edward L. Stokes, The Assassin, and of Hon. Wm. M. Tweed, Of New York, the Notorious Leader of the infamous Tammany Ring (1872) runs as follows:
According to the Wikipedia entry for Connolly, he served in various offices as a Tammany Hall Democrat between 1853 and 1871, when he resigned as City Comptroller just before being indicted for 15 misdemeanors. Wikipedia says that he became known as "Slippery Dick" after becoming a member of the Tweed Ring in 1867.
But the 1859 source of "slippery dick" reports that island fishermen were responsible for adopting that common name. Still, there may be a connection between the slimy, evasive fish and a human being of similar behavior and temper: A surprising number of fictional and historical figures in the nineteenth century bore the familiar name "Slippery Dick."