English to French translation

A load of tosh

January 20, 2006

I am currently reading Underground London, by Stephen Smith. It mentions toshers, who used to go down into London sewers to hunt for any valuable objects that might have been lost and washed away. Not the most glittering of careers, but it has left us an expression, "a load of tosh", which means "a load of nonsense", tosh meaning here rubbish, twaddle. Funnily enough though, originally tosh was the word used by toshers to designate the treasures they found in the sewers, as this quote found in the Oxford English Dictionary tells us:

The sewers-hunters were formerly , and indeed are still, called by the name of "toshers", the artiches which they pick up in the course of their wanderings along shore being known among themselves as "tosh", a word more particularly applied by them to anything made of copper. (H. Mayhew, 1852)

Comments

So, did they call themselves toshers after the tosh, or was the tosh called after them being called toshers? Either way, how did the word tosh or tosher come about in the first place?

Goodness, too many questions for a Friday morning! I was hoping to get just the answers by doing a little research in the library, but the OED was the only help I found. I would be tempted to say that tosh came first, but I found nothing to prove it and nothing to say where the word came from in the first place.

It's a little far-fetched, but: do you think it might have anything to do with the "tosh" in "Macintosh" (from "toisich", the Gaelic for "chief")?

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