A chum of mine in the Mother Country wrote, of old car shows, "One of the main attractions for me used to be rummaging through the boxes of old, rusty tools but we noticed more and more of the stalls were stocking 'Made in Taiwan' rubbish tools, plus the usual plastic tat."

Tat?

Tat is a language spoken by Jews in the Urals.

TAT is an acronym for the Thematic Apperception Test, a psychological measure in which subjects tell a story about a picture, from which the person administering the test may deduce the subject's projections.

TAT is also an acronym for the Trans-Activator-Gene -- a gene in the AIDS virus which compels the host cell to reproduce components of the virus.

TAT is also also an acronym for Trans-Atlantic Telecommunications -- a sort of phone line laid under the ocean in 1956.

TAT is also also also an acronym for turn-around time.

There's a verb named "tat" which describes a process by which infinitely-patient people are able to produce lace.

"Tit for tat" is an expression meaning to retaliate in an equivalent fashion, usually blow for blow, and is supposedly a corruption of "tip for tap" which has something to do with knights bashing on one another.

None of these seemed to represent my correspondent's usage of tat ... as something plastic which looked like a tool but was less desireable than old rusty metal ones. As so often happens, this is a cross-pond difference, yet another Anglo-American linguistic booby trap.

The British definition of tat, when used in this manner, is an object which is tacky, cheap, vulgar, tasteless, sleazy, inelegant, of poor quality or shoddy.