Don't even try to call my legacy corny ... "
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev
Liliputins. What, the heck, is this?
http://stihi.ru/2021/11/24/7101
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corny
ADJECTIVE
informal
trite, banal, or mawkishly sentimental:
"it sounds corny, but as soon as I saw her I knew she was the one"
synonyms:
Similar:
banal
trite
hackneyed
commonplace
cliched
predictable
stereotyped
platitudinous
inane
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Translate corny to
adjective
kitschig
abgedroschen
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Cheesy, unoriginal, or excessively sentimental
"Corny" is a slang term that refers to something that is considered cheesy, unoriginal, or excessively sentimental. It often evokes a sense of being outdated or uncool1. The term is often used to describe jokes, films, stories, or other things that show no new ideas or are too often repeated, and therefore not funny or interesting
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Etymology
corny (adj.)
1570s, "full of corn, pertaining to corn," from corn (n.1) + -y (2). Chaucer used it of ale (late 14c.), perhaps to mean "malty." American English slang "old-fashioned, sentimental" is from 1932 (first attested in "Melody Maker"), perhaps originally "something appealing to country folk" (corn-fed in the same sense is attested from 1929). Related: Cornily; corniness.
There's an element of truth in every idea that lasts long enough to be called corny. [songwriter Irving Berlin (1888-1989), in a 1962 interview]
also from 1570s
Entries linking to corny
corn (n.1)
[grain], Old English corn "single seed of a cereal plant; seeds of cereal plants generally; plants which produce corn when growing in the field," from Proto-Germanic *kurnam "small seed" (source also of Old Frisian and Old Saxon korn "grain," Middle Dutch coren, German Korn, Old Norse korn, Gothic kaurn), from PIE root *gre-no- "grain."
The sense of the Old English word was "grain with the seed still in" (as in barleycorn) rather than a particular plant. Locally understood to denote the leading crop of a district. It has been restricted to the indigenous maize in America (c. 1600, originally Indian corn, but the adjective was dropped), usually "wheat" in England, "oats" in Scotland and Ireland, while Korn means "rye" in parts of Germany.
Maize was introduced to China by 1550, it thrived where rice did not grow well and was a significant factor in the 18th century population boom there. Corn-starch is from 1850. Corn-silk is attested from 1852.
cornball (n.)
"popcorn ball," 1843, from corn (n.1) + ball (n.1). The adjectival meaning "trite and old-fashioned" (by 1949 in Billboard magazine) probably is an elaboration of corny in this sense; cornball "a corny person" is noted in African-American vernacular by 1946.
-y (2)
adjective suffix, "full of or characterized by," from Old English -ig, from Proto-Germanic *-iga- (source also of Dutch, Danish, German -ig, Gothic -egs), from PIE -(i)ko-, adjectival suffix, cognate with elements in Greek -ikos, Latin -icus (see -ic).
Originally added to nouns in Old English; it was used from 13c. with verbs, and by 15c. with other adjectives (for example crispy).
Variant forms in -y for short, common adjectives (vasty, hugy) helped poets keep step with classical feet when the grammatically empty but metrically useful -e dropped off such words in late Middle English. To replace it, verse-writers had adopted to -y forms by Elizabethan times, and often it was done artfully, as in Sackville's "The wide waste places, and the hugy plain." Simple huge plain would have been a metrical balk.
After Coleridge's criticism of the -y forms as archaic artifice, poets gave up stilly (Moore probably was last to get away with it, with "Oft in the Stilly Night"), paly (which Keats and Coleridge himself had used) and the rest. Jespersen ("Modern English Grammar," 1954) also lists bleaky (Dryden), bluey, greeny, and other color words, lanky, plumpy, stouty, and the slang rummy. Vasty survived, he said, only in imitation of Shakespeare; cooly and moisty (Chaucer, hence Spenser) he regarded as fully obsolete. But in a few cases he notes (haughty, dusky) they seem to have supplanted the shorter forms.
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Khrushchev became a hyper-enthusiastic crusader to grow corn (maize). He established a corn institute in Ukraine and ordered thousands of hectares to be planted with corn in the Virgin Lands. In 1955, Khrushchev advocated an Iowa-style corn belt in the Soviet Union, and a Soviet delegation visited the U.S. state that summer. The delegation chief was approached by farmer and corn seed salesman Roswell Garst, who persuaded him to visit Garst's large farm. The Iowan visited the Soviet Union, where he became friends with Khrushchev, and Garst sold the USSR 4,500 metric tons (5,000 short tons) of seed corn. Garst warned the Soviets to grow the corn in the southern part of the country and to ensure there were sufficient stocks of fertilizer, insecticides, and herbicides. This, however, was not done, as Khrushchev sought to plant corn even in Siberia, and without the necessary chemicals. The corn experiment was not a great success, and he later complained that overenthusiastic officials, wanting to please him, had overplanted without laying the proper groundwork, and "as a result corn was discredited as a silage crop—and so was I".