The verb doubt is obviously out. Join Yahoo Answers and get 100 points today. '', It means ''burned, scorched, wiped out, demolished'' (without even the consolation of being remembered, as history offered). It then was used for the browning of bread, which eventually led to the senses of toast referring to the act of proposing or of drinking in honor of someone or something (as in "made a toast to the queen" or "propose a toast to a job well done") and, in the past, to the person or thing so honored: But you'll respect the constitution handed down, etc.—and you'll rally round the throne—and the King, God bless him, and the usual toasts, eh? Frequent use of roadkill with information superhighway can be expected, especially in Internet prose. You're toast, man'' was a passage in The St. Petersburg Times of Oct. 1, 1987, the earliest citation the Oxford English Dictionary research staff has of this usage. The first O.E.D. Fly steals focus during debate, litany Or something like that. You're toast, man'' was a passage in The St. Petersburg Times of Oct. 1, 1987, the earliest citation the Oxford English Dictionary research staff has of this usage. She was thus, metaphorically, the "toast" of the drink. However, the verb to toast continues to mean ''to salute with a glass in hand and an encomium on the lips''; a similar sense of the verb can be discerned in the Caribbean meaning ''to accompany reggae music by shouting.''. We would rather you raise a glass and make a unifying toast than strap on a proton pack and make something toast (unless that something was worshiped as a Mesopotamian god, of course). '', See the article in its original context from. Don't know German, but in English 'toast' is New York slang for gun or guns. We'll know when all is said and done. Originally, toast in Middle English meant "to make thoroughly hot and dry by or as if by the action of fire or the sun." William Shakespeare makes mention of this custom of adding toast to wine in his comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor: "Go, fetch me a quart of sack; put a toast in 't," demands the hard-drinking Sir John Falstaff of his follower Bardolph. Some readers might recall a certain line from the 1984 film Ghostbusters. Can we use "very" and "great" together as in "This is a very great idea".? Toast would have then developed by association with the act of literally raising a piece of toast in a cup in someone's honor, health, etc. This is just a story, but it is true that women were the first to be referred to as "toasts." In our breathless run-up to the millennium, the hot term for outcastedness -- expressed in a combination of scorn and revulsion -- is toast. But history, in its sense of ''hopelessly old-fashioned; last year's craze'' is back in the mists with twenty-three skidoo. We'll be talking about 'Ghostbusters' in a few paragraphs. The first reference to toast in print is in a recipe for Oyle Soppys (flavoured onions stewed in a gallon of stale beer and a pint of oil) from 1430. Stay tuned. (I like whether better because it's less ambiguous than if.) The common reason for adding toast to a drink was to make it more palatable with the spices on the toast, but it also supposedly lessened any bad odor. Alarm shown here 18 months ago about the vogue use of I'm not sure that to mean ''I'm fairly certain that's a lot of hooey'' has failed to dampen the delight in this locution shown by practitioners of sly derogation. You may have heard that the tradition of toasting originated out of a fear of poisoning- the idea being that clinking two glasses together would cause the liquid from both to spill into one another; thus, the people you’re drinking with wouldn’t poison you as they’d then be poisoning themselves. Drop the hyphen; close up the space and write it as roadkill. There’s a huge semantic gulf between “I’m gonna turn you into toast” and “You’re toast.” The OED ’s next example of “toast” used in Murray’s sense of the word is from a quotation in the Omaha World-Herald (1985): “Shake, Fedya … because you’re toast!” (The word's demise seemed to be further hastened by Francis Fukuyama's amusing musing about Clio in his provocative book titled ''The End of History.''). The answer rests on whether you want to express uncertainty or disbelief. These example sentences will make the meaning of this idiom clear and easy to remember. The idiom "you're toast" means that you are finished. '', Nearly a decade later, Tom Friedman, a foreign-affairs columnist for The New York Times, envisioned Secretary of State Madeleine Albright urging Jiang Zemin, the Chinese leader, toward the next stage of economic development because ''if you can't deliver that next stage you're toast.'' 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