What is a Tosser?

[pool]

I think this was used in the movie Beerfest buy some British sailors but I can't remember. I'm guessing it is some kind of British slang, but what does it mean?

[fishbicycle]

Same as "wanker."

[pool]

Hmmm I guess I'm a bit of a plonker for now knowing that.

[jjimm]

Literally: masturbator (from "to toss oneself off").
Figuratively: jerk + bastard + idiot.

[Szlater]

What is a Tosser?

The chap with the caber.

[aldiboronti]

There's also the common British expression I couldn't give a toss, ie I couldn't care less. Same verb (toss=wank) but one couldn't substitute in this case: I couldn't give a wank would be unidiomatic.

[Fear Itself]

Literally: masturbator (from "to toss oneself off").
Well, that put a whole 'nother spin on the term, "tosspot".

[jjimm]

Tosspot means as you have indeed surmised.

Also, "that's a load of [old] toss" - figuratively a particularly vehement expression of "nonsense".

[Alive At Both Ends]

Tosspot means as you have indeed surmised.
True. I've always wondered how JRR Tolkien got away with using the word in The Hobbit, which was meant as a children's book (and it's an elf who says it, no less - I thought they were more refined than that).

[Fear Itself]

Tosspot means as you have indeed surmised.When did it change from its 'drunkard' meaning?

[Johnny Hildo]

Hmmm I guess I'm a bit of a plonker for now knowing that.

Yeah, you're being a real numpty.

[Alive At Both Ends]

When did it change from its 'drunkard' meaning?
To be honest, I was unaware that it ever had meant "drunkard". I certainly wouldn't use it to mean that in public. Perhaps I'm just wrong here (but at least I'm evidently not the only one).

[wendigo1974]

'Tosser' is oh so very Grange Hill '70s style.
Envisage gritty angsty kitchen sink drama.

Like wise 'twat', while it is now commonplace to use it to refer to ladies furry front bottoms it used to be quite innoccuos "Look at you, prancing around like a twat on the dance floor"
In that case twat = prat

Nowadays were so much more vulgar and now just state "Your dancing like a cunt you wank....AHHHHH!!!"

Tosser has gone the way of gaylord and wazzock as being words which now say more about the user then the target.

Tis the end of civilisation I tells ye!

[Fear Itself]

To be honest, I was unaware that it ever had meant "drunkard". Maybe its an American thing (http://www.bartleby.com/61/39/T0283900.html). I've never heard of the mastubation angle until this thread.

[Szlater]

'Tosser' is oh so very Grange Hill '70s style.
Envisage gritty angsty kitchen sink drama.

Like wise 'twat', while it is now commonplace to use it to refer to ladies furry front bottoms it used to be quite innoccuos "Look at you, prancing around like a twat on the dance floor"
In that case twat = prat

It's always been slang for female genitalia, even as far back as 1660.

'They'd talk't of his having a Cardinalls Hat,
They'd send him as soon an Old Nuns Twat.'

Nowadays were so much more vulgar and now just state "Your dancing like a cunt you wank....AHHHHH!!!"

Tosser has gone the way of gaylord and wazzock as being words which now say more about the user then the target.

Tis the end of civilisation I tells ye!

Tosser is still in everyday use round my way. I haven't heard Gaylord since I was about 5, and I always thought wazzock was pretty much a norvern thing.

"Berk" is a favourite of mine, but I'll let someone else explain it.

[wendigo1974]

Tosser is meaningless, like twat used to be.
If there is a huge Tosser = Wanker revival then maybe it would re-attain it's significance.
I can't see it happening.
"Oi, ya bastard" is theorhetically quite insulting, it doesn't actually come across that way.

[Szlater]

Tosser is meaningless, like twat used to be.
If there is a huge Tosser = Wanker revival then maybe it would re-attain it's significance.
I can't see it happening.
"Oi, ya bastard" is theorhetically quite insulting, it doesn't actually come across that way.

Twat is/was never meaningless.

Inflection and context, imo are the deciding factors on how offensive they are at any given moment.

Tosser is frequently accompanied by the open fist/wrist waggle (I don't know how to describe it) hand gesture, so its meaning is pretty much intact imo.

[Full Metal Lotus]

I just asked my father in law, who was born and raised in Portsmith, and he suggested the best "north american " translation would be "Jerk Off"... (A useless sort who masturbates a bit too frequently...) As in "that jerk off/tosser couldn't pour pee out of boot with instructions written on the heel!"

Regards
FML

[wendigo1974]

Szlater your too Northern for your own good.
You think waggling hands about and saying in lowly breathed tones "tosser" carries much weight in southern society?
Physical violence is the only recourse to such polemic.

While your etymology for the word "twat" is correct, it's offensive nature has actually only been 'actualised' over the last 20 years.

You want to surround yourself with college educated folk, instead of the working class bastages which are pervading your thinking ... ya bastard!

[Szlater]

Szlater your too Northern for your own good.

That would be a really good trick. I was born in Sussex, raised in South London.

You want to surround yourself with college educated folk, instead of the working class bastages which are pervading your thinking ... ya bastard!

Yeah, I'll tell that to my colleagues in cancer research.

[wendigo1974]

That would be a really good trick. I was born in Sussex, raised in South London.
Yeah, I'll tell that to my colleagues in cancer research.

I was born in South Kensington and raised in South East Sussex.
Sad that the best people we could find for cancer researchers were northern twats governed by a mockney wideboy :(

[Gfactor]

Let's stop the personal remarks and stay on topic, mkay?

Gfactor, General Questions Moderator

[Mangetout]

When did it change from its 'drunkard' meaning?
My impression is that it acquired the meaning after 'toss' had become slang for masturbation, but I can't find anything to support this.

I've heard the term 'tosspot' also alleged to describe persons who engage in impromptu sex with strangers, but again, I can't find anything to support that, and I think the person who told it to me may have misunderstood it from hearing it a single time in Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood - Jack Black the zealot cobbler is described as dreaming of:
chasing the naughty couples down the grassgreen gooseberried double bed of the wood, flogging the tosspots in the spit-and-sawdust, driving out the bare, bold girls from the sixpenny hops of his nightmares.
-i.e. he's dreaming of punishing the wicked, but although the naughty couples and the bare bold girls are clearly sexual references, the tosspots are in 'the spit and sawdust' - that's a pub.

I can't help wondering if the term 'toss' to mean masturbate might have grown out of a smirky reading of an existing dictionary definition of the word (this time meaning to sleep restlessly:
to fling or jerk oneself or move restlessly about, esp. on a bed or couch
-I can well imagine schoolboys reading that and laughing at what appears to be a double meaning.

I thought the same thing about the slang use of the word 'muff', because the (OED) dictionary describes it as:
A woman's fur or other covering (usually cylindrical) into which both hands are thrust to keep them warm

But both of those connections are probably too good to be true, even though the dictionary definitions are real.

[Szlater]

I can't help wondering if the term 'toss' to mean masturbate might have grown out of a smirky reading of an existing dictionary definition of the word (this time meaning to sleep restlessly:
to fling or jerk oneself or move restlessly about, esp. on a bed or couch
-I can well imagine schoolboys reading that and laughing at what appears to be a double meaning.

I thought the same thing about the slang use of the word 'muff', because the (OED) dictionary describes it as:
A woman's fur or other covering (usually cylindrical) into which both hands are thrust to keep them warm

But both of those connections are probably too good to be true, even though the dictionary definitions are real.

I think you should submit those as suggestions for words to investigate for the next series of Balderdash & Piffle.

[samclem]

I thought the same thing about the slang use of the word 'muff', because the (OED) dictionary describes it as:
A woman's fur or other covering (usually cylindrical) into which both hands are thrust to keep them warm
. "Muff" in the sense of a woman's pubic hair shows up in print meaning such ca. 1698 in British English.