To see her for a minute--for but a minute--to find her going out to a party and glad to go; to be looked upon as a common pipe- smoker, beer-bibber, spirit-guzzler, and
tosspot! He bade farewell to his friend the locksmith, and hastened to take horse at the Black Lion, thinking as he turned towards home, as many another Joe has thought before and since, that here was an end to all his hopes--that the thing was impossible and never could be--that she didn't care for him--that he was wretched for life--and that the only congenial prospect left him, was to go for a soldier or a sailor, and get some obliging enemy to knock his brains out as soon as possible.
The geezer's a Damien Hirst-class
tosspot. He does all this patriotic posturin', then scarpers to America to tell all the Septic Tanks how sh*t Britain is, while still getting paid his massive rock of ages off Brussels.
"I might go and punch him because he's a
tosspot and he left the party in the state it's in," he said.
Or is it the falling-downdrunk Dylan, the prototype, promiscuous,
tosspot poet, the tormented soul of those last grave-chasing days across the ocean?
As Seymour Slive has written, 'the fallacious idea that an artist who depicted merry drinkers must needs have been a
tosspot himself dies hard'.
And there were those tombstones, with the epitaph to Falstaff: "Glutton, rogue and
tosspot", they proclaimed.
"The irony is that the one thing guaranteed to make "young people" do something is for a pompous
tosspot like Tony to tell them not to.
The performers sometimes elaborated their part of the song with suitable actions, and in particular
Tosspot was usually supposed to be drunk and acted accordingly.
"
tosspot to touch-me-not" [1359]: "Lips that touch liquor ..."
It would be nice if self- important, hockey-loving
tosspot Rupert Lowe found out for himself the grass isn't always greener
In Like Will to Like (1562-8), (21) Nichol Newfangle the Vice offers Tom
Tosspot and Rafe Roister lands of St.
Auden put it, nearly two generations ago: Chimeras mauled them, they wasted away with the spleen, Suicide picked them off, sunk off Cape Consumption, Lost on the
Tosspot Seas, wrecked on the Gibbering Isles Or trapped in the ice of despair at the Soul's Pole.