You’re
toast!
This is a
common expression to clarify that something or someone is kaput, defunct. The dictionary
definition says:
Be toast:
1. To be in serious trouble; to be ruined, finished, or defeated.
2. To be completely broken, wrecked, or destroyed.
It was
first used in a more formal sense in the 19th century.
‘Thinking he had got us fairly on toast, he
meant to blackmail us pretty freely.’
— John Guille Millais, A Breath from the Veldt, 1895
It was referenced obliquely in the 1984 film, ‘Ghostbusters’, written by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis. The original script had, ‘I’m gonna turn this guy into toast’, but Bill Murray, playing the parapsychologist Dr Peter Venkman, extemporised instead, ‘This chick is toast’. This is believed to be the first time ‘toast’ was used as slang.
The following appeared three years later:
‘'' 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. ''Actually, the trendiest way of saying someone is finished is to say 'He's toast,' '' wrote the columnist George Will the following year.’
Seven
years ago we purchased a four-slice toaster. It functioned perfectly adequately
until yesterday, when only one half of the toaster would work. It could be said
that the toaster is now toast – well, half of it, anyway.
