Corniness

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A state where expressions are overly sentimental or clichéd tends to lead to a perception of dullness or predictability in creative works
2. The characteristic of being excessively trite often results in a response of mockery or disbelief due to its lack of originality and predictability
3. The quality of being overly sentimental or clichéd results in a perception of insincerity and typically evokes amusement or ridicule

Etymology: "Corniness" is a plain English formation: the adjective "corny" with the suffix "-ness," which turns an adjective into a noun for a quality. The base word traces back to Old English "corn," meaning grain, the same ancestor that gives modern English "corn" its sense of cereal. Its ancestry runs through Proto-Germanic "kurnąn" and the Proto-Indo-European root for grain, and the suffix "-ness" descends from Old English "-nes," which has been attached to adjectives since the earliest English. The adjective "corny" is the more surprising part. Its path from grain to triteness is not something the word's history spells out, so the connection is best understood by working from the sense of the adjective itself: a quality that is excessively trite, predictable and unoriginal, the kind of thing that invites mockery or disbelief. Readers should treat the grain sense as the word's literal root and the modern sense as a later extension of it.

Synonyms: cliché, banality, triteness

Antonyms: originality, novelty