Modern Toss was invented in 2004 as the label for a series of cartoons by Jon Link and Mick Bunnage. Many use foul language and some are very funny. Under the category of Work, a man says to a person sitting at a desk: ‘I think I’ll go home. I’m a bit bored.’ As often in satire, reality has imitated art.

I assume the title Modern Toss coincides in meaning with an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary from 2007 giving an ‘additional sense’ for toss. An illustrative quotation came from Viz for 7 December 1990: ‘See this book Tom… Yes, I’ve read it actually. Yeah. Me n’all. Right load of toss, isn’t it. But at 16 quid a throw, he must be coining it in.’

The dictionary, in suggesting an etymology, invokes a letter from 1915 by Lytton Strachey quoted in P.N. Furbanks’s biography of E.M. Forster: ‘À propos of Maurice tossing himself off… you say – “He knew what the price would be – a creeping apathy towards all things”.’ But the OED also points to the phrase not to give a toss, cited from 1876, in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda: ‘I don’t care a toss where you are.’

Eliot’s kind of toss was illustrated by a quotation from Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf’s father, who in the Dictionary of National Biography wrote of Matthew Concanen (1701-49) coming to London with a friend, James Sterling. ‘They took to hackwork in literature, and decided by the toss of a halfpenny that Concanen should defend the ministry, while Sterling was to be in opposition.’

But I was annoyed last week by a BBC News website article by Kevin Peachey about ‘flipping a coin for a 50/50 chance of £1 million’. Using flip instead of toss seemed an Americanism. I might wonder whether toss was now avoided because of its taboo connotation, but then the Americans speak of flipping the bird (an obscene gesture with the middle finger). Whether to say toss or flip now seems just heads or tails.