Am I Right To Be Feeling This Way?
Family Life5 mins ago
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Codswallop, as Indie says, means nonsense or drivel. Its origin is unknown and it is just an urban myth that it relates to some lemonade made by some Victorian called Codd. The scholars of The Oxford English Dictionary fail to give it house-room in their description of the word and - if they say the origin is unknown - then unknown it is.
Actually, 'wallop' as a colloquial name for beer dates back only to the 1930s - hence, no Victorian connection - and there is no evidence that it was ever applied to lemonade.
One old meaning of 'cods' was 'testicles', so that is probably a much more likely connection. People may at one time have said "Cods!" in much the same way as we today use the b-words for those organs to mean 'nonsense', too. In fact, 'codswallop' itself is not recorded anywhere prior to the 1960s, as it happens. Had it been around in Victorian times, as claimed, I cannot imagine Dickens would not have used it in the mouth of one of his London characters. Cheers