Crossword clues for tosspot
tosspot
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Tosspot \Toss"pot`\, n.
A toper; one habitually given to strong drink; a drunkard.
--Shak.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Wiktionary
n. 1 (context colloquial now rare English) A drunkard, one who drinks alcohol frequently. 2 (context UK slang English) A fool, prat; an idiot.
Wikipedia
Tosspot is a British English insult, used to refer to a stupid or contemptible person, or a drunkard.
The word is of Middle English origin, and meant a person who drank heavily. Beer or ale was customarily served in ceramic pots, so a tosspot was a person who copiously 'tossed back' such pots of beer. The word "tosspots" appears in relation to drunkenness in the song which closes Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. The morality play Like Will to Like, by Shakespeare's contemporary Ulpian Fulwell, contains a character named Tom Tosspot, who remarks that
"If any poore man have in a whole week earned a grote, He shal spend it in one houre in tossing the pot".Tosspot is also a character in the traditional British Pace Egg play or Mummers play.
In the Pace Egging Song which accompanies the play the verse for "Old Tosspot" is;
''And the last that comes in is Old Tosspot you see. ''He's a valiant old man, in every degree. ''He's a valiant old man and he wears a pig tail. And all his delight is in drinking mulled ale!
As with most traditional folk songs the exact words vary.
In the chapter "Step Eight" of the Alcoholics Anonymous book Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions by Bill Wilson, the phrase "... tosspot call[ing] a kettle black" causes some confusion for readers who are not familiar with the adage. In the original editions of the book it stated "that is like the pot calling the kettle black." The old saying means a person who is as flawed as the person he or she is criticizing has no right to complain about the other's flaws. The pot, after all, is as blackened by the flames as the kettle. Wilson's little pun places the tosspot, or the drunk, in the position of the flawed individual who should not criticize others.This might have perhaps come from old times when pots and pans were generally black and kettles were generally metallic and reflective. Therefore the pot sees its black reflection in the kettle and thinks that the kettle is black.
Usage examples of "tosspot".
Until the pointing out of the cyclists Clive had managed to force himself to enjoy, indeed to revel in, the wild drinkers, the dirt, the litter, the terrible record company tosspots, the whole gritty urban shmeer of north London but the cyclists spoilt it all.
Thereafter he sang as followeth: "Bold bawcocks, brave, bibulous, babbling boys, Tall tosspots, come, temper this tumult and noise.
She was still only a woman with dead arms and a dead husband, cuffed to the posts of this bed like a cur dog chained to a ringbolt and left to die unremarked and unlamented in a dusty back yard while his tosspot master serves thirty days in the country clink for driving without a license and under the influence.
The year-round residents always had to have someone to look at -a tosspot, a welfare slacker, The Kid from a Good Family who had been picked up shoplifting in Portland or Old Orchard Beach .