15 Comments
can this word have the same double meaning of being in trouble as it does in english slang? "TOST ydy e!" "he's TOAST!"
Yeah,in that sense. I kinda regret asking now though, it is just slang that kids use really.
There's nothing wrong with asking :) For "He's done for" you could use Mae (hi) wedi canu arno fe = "It's sung on him". I don't know why we say that, but it conveys more or less the same meaning.
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Isn't there a second meaning of 'tost' which is about being painful? Which comes up in a medical section later on? That seems to suggest a similar connection... (Yes, as mentioned below...)
Yeah, tost can either be the noun "toast" as here or an adjective "ill". Both appear to be borrowings. The "ill" meaning is the older, from Latin tostus "toasted, scorched, parched", so you can see how it came to eventually mean "ill". The "toast" meaning was borrowed later from English toast, which of course is a borrowing from the same Latin word via Old French.
The idiomatic He's toast i.e. referring to someone as being "burned, scorched, wiped out, demolished etc." was a much later development in the English language.
This means that although there isn't a direct relationship between "He's toast" and Welsh adjectival tost "ill" in the sense that one is derived from the other, it does show how Latin tostus developed separately in the two languages to mean different but somewhat related things.
- 1020
Autocorrect messed up my answer, but then it said the correct answer was "Ill." Anyone know why?
As well as being a noun meaning 'toast', tost is also an adjective meaning 'ill'.
