What is a Tosser?

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 :frowning:

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

Gfactor, General Questions Moderator

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.

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

“Muff” in the sense of a woman’s pubic hair shows up in print meaning such ca. 1698 in British English.