Origin and history of toasty

"piece of bread browned by fire or dry heat," early 15c., tost, from toast (v.1); originally as something added to wine, ale, etc. It is attested from 17c. as something eaten on its own with a spread. Tostie is attested from late 14c. as "toasted piece of bread, dish made with toast."

The slang meaning "a goner, person or thing already doomed or destroyed" is recorded by 1987, perhaps from the notion of computer circuits being "fried," and with unconscious echoes of earlier figurative phrase be had on toast (1881) "be swindled," on the notion of "be served up for eating." To have (someone) on toast was to have the person at one's mercy (1889). Earlier was served up on toast (1842). Other sources trace the extended sense and popularity to its use in the 1984 film "Ghostbusters."

very common adjective suffix, "full of, covered with, or characterized by" the thing expressed by the noun, Middle English -i, from Old English -ig, from Proto-Germanic *-iga-, from PIE -(i)ko-, adjectival suffix, cognate with elements in Greek -ikos, Latin -icus (see -ic). Germanic cognates include Dutch, Danish, German -ig, Gothic -egs.

It was used from 13c. with verbs (drowsy, clingy), and by 15c. with other adjectives (crispy). Chiefly with monosyllables; with more than two the effect tends to become comedic.

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Variant forms in -y for short, common adjectives (vasty, hugy) helped poets after the loss of grammatically empty but metrically useful -e in late Middle English. Verse-writers adapted to -y forms, often artfully, as in Sackville's "The wide waste places, and the hugy plain" (and the huge plain would have been a metrical balk).

After Coleridge's criticism of it as archaic artifice, poets gave up stilly (Moore probably was last to make it work, with "Oft in the Stilly Night"), paly (which Keats and Coleridge himself had used) and the rest.

Jespersen ("Modern English Grammar," 1954) also lists bleaky (Dryden), bluey, greeny, and other color words, lanky, plumpy, stouty, and the slang rummy. Vasty survives, he writes, only in imitation of Shakespeare; cooly and moisty (Chaucer, hence Spenser) he regards as fully obsolete. But in a few cases he notes (haughty, dusky) they seem to have supplanted shorter forms.