Entry · catalog no. 1071

off the cob

/ /ɔːf ðə ˈkɒb/ /awf-thuh-KOB

adjective · Harlem, New York · 1930s

✓ Verified

Corny; out of date; badly out of step with what's happening.

“That joke was off the cob before we even got here.”

Origin & Attribution

From Cab Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary (1938): "corny, out of date." Corn and corny as words for the unsophisticated passed into general American English through Black musicians' jive, where the judgment was aesthetic and exacting.

1938

Defined in Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary

1940s

'corny' enters general English

Region of origin

West

Midwest

N.East

South

The Northeast

Harlem, New York · 1930s

Spoken by

Harlem swing musicians

$OFFTHEThe Record · cultural traction

▲ Faded

88 yrs

ahead of the mainstream

28/100

peak cultural energy

Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.

Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest

First used

1938

in the culture

Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.

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Philadelphia, PA

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Citations & Sources

■

Cab Calloway, Hepster's Dictionary: A Guide to the Language of Jive — dictionary · 1938

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