The Crucial Difference Between ‘Cheesy’ and ‘Corny’
❝ Both etymologies are anecdotal and inconclusive. By some accounts, corny comes to us via jazz musicians in the 1930s, describing licks that sounded unfashionable and trite—something more at home in the agricultural environment of a square dance than a sophisticated urban jazz club. Corny might have also been extrapolated from seed catalogs that circulated starting in the 1890s and included simple and predictable little jokes in the margins that some called “corn jokes.” Either way, the meaning seems to hinge on an aesthetically condescending geographic association with rural America. Cheesy, by contrast, has almost no clear path to its current association. Some claim the term has nothing to do with the food, but instead arrives through an ironic reversal of the Urdu chiz, meaning “thing,” which, picked up by British occupiers in the early 1800s, gave us phrases like “the big cheese.” ❞ *
Leave a Reply