[Dixielandjazz] Codswallop

[Eric Holroyd]

Bob Ringwald now wants to know "What is codswallop".

The best explanation that I've come across quotes an English soft drinks 
maker named Hiram Codd who, in the 1870s, discovered  how to successfully 
bottle lemonade.

The secret of his process involved inserting a glass marble into the 
bottle's neck to act as a stopper.

(I have one of these bottles), and it works very well indeed. Had the DJML 
rules not precluded attachments, I would have provided a photograph as 
evidence, but they do so I won't.

If the lemonade bottle was shaken, the pressure generated would force the 
marble higher up the neck to form a perfectly good seal.

This wondrous device was called the Codd Bottle.

Now, English slang has for generations used "wallop" as a name for beer, and 
British beer drinkers were just like beer drinkers the world over in their 
disdain for people who drank only soft drinks, so they apparently referred 
to a bottle of lemonade as "Codd's Wallop" - a term which quickly found its 
way into Servicemen's slang.

Unfortunately, there are no written records of its usage prior to the 1930s, 
when Eric Partridge's "Dictionary Of Slang" lists it it that era.

However, the English writer, J.B.Priestley used it in his excellent 1945 
book, "Three Men In New Suits", and the scriptwriters Galton & Simpson used 
it in a "Hancock's Half Hour" script in a 1959 episode of that popular BBC 
Radio series.

Indeed, there are many DMJLers in UK and the Antipodes who would recall that 
wonderful series and could no doubt visualise the wonderfully pompous Tony 
Hancock dismissing a subject under discussion as "A right load of old 
codswallop".

Which is what this erudite thread could become if developed sufficiently by 
the cognoscenti.

Eric Holroyd
Sydney, Australia