bq.:http://english2american.com/dictionary/cat_misc.html Codswallop noun A rather antiquated but superb word meaning “nonsense”. The etymology leads to an English gentleman named Hiram Codd, who in 1872 came up with the idea of putting a marble and a small rubber ring just inside the necks of bottles in order to keep fizzy beer (“wallop”, in old English) fizzy. The idea was the the pressure of the fizz would push the marble against the ring, thereby sealing the bottle airtight. Unfortunately, the thing wasn’t nearly as natty as he’d hoped and “codd’s wallop” slid into the language first as a disparaging comment about flat beer and eventually as a general term of abuse.