Origin of Phrase 'sweating cobs'

[ianbearpark]

What is the origin of the phrase 'to sweat cobs'?

[M.T.Vessel]

I think the phrase may have originated from a chef when he was cooking corn on the cob because when you fry it it sweats.

[Big Man]

I believe that it means that you are a cob head and that you sweat a lot!!

[andy hughes]

I understood it to mean issuing large beads of perspiration, which resemble cobble stones.

[Quizmonster]

The word 'cob' has been used to mean anything rounded - eg a type of bread - since the 16th century. A cob horse, for example, is a short, stout breed. (It was even used as slang for 'testicle' at one time.) It's easy to see, therefore, how it came to suggest large 'beads' of sweat.

[MidlanderUK]

I didn't realise cob mean't anything round. In my local dialect, that is Nottingham in the UK, we call bread rolls/baps, cobs. Everyone else in the UK doesn't understand what you mean when you ask for one. :-)~

[TerryJ]

Cob is an old word meaning something round. It also was used to describe a spider - as in cobweb. My suggestion for the above phrase is that when one is sweating profusely the beads of sweat feel like a spider scuttling down one's face, or alternatively the feeling of walking into a spiders web.

[ianbearpark]

Are you kidding me Terry? why this?

[ew100]

A "cob" is a generic term for a type of (UK) native breed horse.

They were the common workhorse in Victorian Britain, pulling delivery carts, canal barges and so on. When they work, they sweat, so "sweating like a cob" means sweating like a workhorse. This form of the saying still gets used, certainly in Yorkshire.

It is but a short linguistic hop from that to "sweating cobs", so I would suggest that this is the most likely origin.

[etmologyattested]

'cob' "a word ... with a wide range of meanings, many seeming to derive from notions of "heap, lump, rounded object," also "head," and metaphoric extensions of both. With its cognates in other Germanic languages, of uncertain origin and development."
If you search 'Cob loaf' you'll see it's is a very common use of the word 'cob'. So extending that to beads of sweat is natural. It has nothing to do with chefs, that is putting the horse before the cart. Besides,

"corn-cob (n.)

 elongated woody shoot of a maize plant on which the grains grow," 1787, from corn + cob . Corncob pipe is attested from 1832" etymonline. So the cob in 'Corncob' is the priapic 'core' the corn grows on would not be a likely analogy for beads of sweat. In the UK, 'corn on the cob' is how an ear of maize is described, not the grain.  If 'corn' were the origin it would be 'sweating corns'. Corn has the meaning of seed and is a cognate of kernal, 
It's better to go to written evidence rather than invent, yet another, folk etymology, that helps nobody.

[etmologyattested]

'cob' "a word ... with a wide range of meanings, many seeming to derive from notions of "heap, lump, rounded object," also "head," and metaphoric extensions of both. With its cognates in other Germanic languages, of uncertain origin and development."
If you search 'Cob loaf' you'll see it's is a very common use of the word 'cob'. So extending that to beads of sweat is natural. It has nothing to do with chefs, that is putting the horse before the cart. Besides,

"corn-cob (n.)

 elongated woody shoot of a maize plant on which the grains grow," 1787, from corn + cob . Corncob pipe is attested from 1832" etymonline. So the cob in 'Corncob' is the priapic 'core' the corn grows on would not be a likely analogy for beads of sweat. In the UK, 'corn on the cob' is how an ear of maize is described, not the grain.  If 'corn' were the origin it would be 'sweating corns'. Corn has the meaning of seed and is a cognate of kernal, 
It's better to go to written evidence rather than invent, yet another, folk etymology, that helps nobody.