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What is the meaning of Cods Wollop
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Cod's Wallop was originally a low priced fizzy lemonade
From http://www.blue-room.org.uk/lofiversion/index.php/t1553. html
"It refers to the late Hiram Codd, who, despite his archetypally American first name, was British, born in Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk in 1838. He spent his life working in the soft drinks business. In the 1870s, he designed and patented a method of sealing a glass bottle by means of a ball in its neck, which the pressure of the gas in the fizzy drink forced against a rubber washer. Making the bottle was a technical challenge, since the ball necessarily had to be larger than the diameter of the neck. It was only in 1876, when he teamed up with a Yorkshire glass blower named Ben Rylands, that the answer was found. The Codd bottle was an immediate success; surviving examples are now highly collectable. You opened them by pushing the ball into the neck, and openers in the shape of short, thin cylinders were supplied for the purpose. One unexpected problem was that children smashed the bottles to use the glass balls as marbles. The suggestion is that drinkers who preferred their tipple to have alcohol in it were dismissive of Mr Codd's soft drinks. As beer was often called wallop, they referred sneeringly to the fizzy drink as Codd's wallop, and the resulting word later spread its meaning to refer to anything considered to be rubbish."
From http://www.blue-room.org.uk/lofiversion/index.php/t1553. html
"It refers to the late Hiram Codd, who, despite his archetypally American first name, was British, born in Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk in 1838. He spent his life working in the soft drinks business. In the 1870s, he designed and patented a method of sealing a glass bottle by means of a ball in its neck, which the pressure of the gas in the fizzy drink forced against a rubber washer. Making the bottle was a technical challenge, since the ball necessarily had to be larger than the diameter of the neck. It was only in 1876, when he teamed up with a Yorkshire glass blower named Ben Rylands, that the answer was found. The Codd bottle was an immediate success; surviving examples are now highly collectable. You opened them by pushing the ball into the neck, and openers in the shape of short, thin cylinders were supplied for the purpose. One unexpected problem was that children smashed the bottles to use the glass balls as marbles. The suggestion is that drinkers who preferred their tipple to have alcohol in it were dismissive of Mr Codd's soft drinks. As beer was often called wallop, they referred sneeringly to the fizzy drink as Codd's wallop, and the resulting word later spread its meaning to refer to anything considered to be rubbish."
This question was asked a short time ago:
http://www.theanswerbank.co.uk/Phrases-and-Sayings/Question100384.html
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
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