The word "tosh" is correct and usable in written English.
It is most commonly used as a slang term to refer to something or someone that is of little value or importance. For example, "The ideas he presented in the meeting can be dismissed as just tosh!".
I think most of the above is tosh, but I have been listening to romantic politicians of both left and right – from Enoch Powell to Tony Benn – making versions of it most of my life.
Some of this may have been tosh – we don't wave flags because a politician advises us to, but do it quite naturally for sporting events and the like – but at least it was consistent tosh.
Somebody said some complete bit of tosh about how it was good for your heart.
The cause is not helped by the generally perceived notion that French literature these days, a bit like French cinema, is mainly pretentious tosh – incomprehensible when it is not simply boring.
Many of us will know that Braveheart (1995) is tosh when we watch it, but years later bits of it may have taken root in our imaginations – and we don't always remember that they emanated from that great steaming heap of lies.
It is a word that reminds me of the fast one about to be pulled, the value about to be added, the tosh about to be talked, the microconnoisseur at your elbow.
The answer, Mr Chirac explained to the nation on July 14th, the anniversary of the 1789 revolution, is that if he were to meet the judges, he would imperil not himself as a citizen ("I have nothing to hide"), but the office of the presidency, the institutional balance of the republic and even French democracy itself.Self-serving tosh from a president campaigning to be re-elected next spring?
But for many Pound remains a freak and an embarrassment, a clinical nutcase and vicious anti-Semite who churned out a lot of impenetrable tosh before losing the plot completely.During the second world war he broadcast pro-Fascist radio programmes from Italy and later avoided trial for treason at home only because he was declared insane.
"Towering genius disdains a beaten path," Lincoln once said, which limits what can be learned from his example.But not all Lincolnology is tosh.
Sign-writers and printers will be glad of the new business, politicians will claim a blow against British cultural enslavement and a victory for authenticity (though that story about the old woman and the king may be tosh), but many others will give a weary sigh.
