It's time for mumsnetters to finally define "tat"

Tat is a word people use to describe something liked by someone else in order to make themselves look superior. It doesn’t work. It just makes them look judgemental.

Tat is cheap stuff with no purpose, that is looked at/played with for minutes before being ignored, that will break quickly and easily, and is shortly destined for landfill. HTH.

tat is all that is wanted by children in their stockings

This !

We were in a shopping centre yesterday and I noticed that several new shops seem to have popped up selling stuff like cheap looking Kpop demon hunter clothing and hoodies with the "6,7" slogan on them. To me that is tat, stuff that is poor quality and has been mass produced as quickly as possible to tie into a trend that will probably die down in a few weeks. I suppose it's better to have something there than an empty shop unit though.

Surely one man's tat is another man's treasure?

I am rubbish at home decor. If I put an ornament anywhere, it looks like it has been put down on the way to somewhere else.
A friend can put stuff together so so well (as in Ideal Home has done her house), that she has groups of items that individually I would call tat, but how she does it, they look fabulous

One persons tat is anothers treasure 😁

I always thought tat was gimmicky bits. Like valentines day. You are my valentine plastic ornaments or plushie that after the day becomes redundant. But...if its from your young child or someone you love after a lovely day..it becomes a keepsake treasured memory item 😂

The ad I'm seeing on this thread features a dog wearing a balaclava. I think dog balaclavas are tat even if made from pure lambswool .

Anything that they could buy at higher prices before it became accessible for everyone else to buy.

It’s basically the leftie woke peoples way of telling everyone else to stay in their lane and not indulge in buying stuff which they themselves happily bought.

A bit like normal people eating supermarket chicken is cruelty but they themselves are morally superior because they buy it from the local farm shop, and the chicken had access to a fully furnished gym for recreation and ate only gold nuggets for breakfast.

From October to the end of December, ‘tat’ is mentioned thousands of times on here

I’m sure there’s also a massive uptick in other things that are associated with Christmas and that some people find annoying, like “MIL” and “Buble”.

Tat is stuff we are manipulated into buying.

From October to the end of December, ‘tat’ is mentioned thousands of times on here, usually by the same posters who get annoyed at ‘Americanisms’. They get very worked up about celebrating Halloween, Autumn decor, themed bedding as well as ‘plastic tat’. One thread ended up with one of the tat haters calling others cunts and wankers. I quite like to see them lose their minds about tat. 😅

I will use the word "tat" with the word "plastic" in front, so usually for toys, pocket money toys, the kind of things you get out of those egg machines.

Cheap, poorly made, will break in no time whatsoever and end up in landfill. Tat.

Even wall paint and pictures/art, jewellery, graphic design? I think purely decorative things can be important and/or beautiful and valuable, for me it’s not just that something has no practical use in itself.

YES!!!! That exact one. 😂😂😂😂

We could only afford things from the market in my youth. Things that would've been described as "tat" nowadays on here, but had lasted us through nearly a decade with very little money to spare.

I love tat

I would agree on the cheap, poor quality thing. And tacky. I put my decorations up yesterday and I’m now looking at my beautiful wooden mini nativity set, that I’ve had for years. It is good quality and just rather beautiful. I personally wouldn’t say that is tat. However a few metres away I have a decorative red and white glittery candy cane. Bits of glitter keep dropping off it. That’s tat. But I love it 🥰

I remember having one of those. With several bizarre tiny orange plastic babies in thr windows.

Tat as it was, we had to put the individual toys back every year after Christmas, and the calendar was reused again and again.

absolute snobbery
would you use the word Tat in public?
eergh

It looks flat rather than anything that would contain toys and there seems to be debate in the comments about whether it did or didn't 😃

In any event, advent calendars with anything but pictures were rare until the late 80s.

Yes and this! But this quote is about your personal appraisal of what is useful or beautiful (which is fair enough). However I think it’s possible to also objectively define tat for the purposes of identifying stuff that is bad for the environment and unnecessary.

Anything from Shein or Temu.

Ok for me tat is:

• low quality materials and/or badly made
• low in value (even if expensive)
• Little to no practical usefulness - either because it’s just decorative, or because it’s badly made
• Ugly

Tat includes things like cheap wine glasses badly painted with Christmas designs, synthetic jumpers that feel nasty and go bobbly and matted after one wash, mass-produced plastic toys or objects from cheap crackers, cheapo chemical filled bath bombs.

Tat is not inherently linked to Christmas but it does make more of an appearance at Christmas. I try to avoid tat for environmental reasons and because I’ve learned that buying less but better quality stuff is more cost-effective. And tat can be so ugly/naff that it’s funny and I don’t think it’s wrong or snobby to have a laugh at funny tat. (Though I actually haven’t been on many threads about tat myself, but not because I disapprove)

It's always been rife here.

Back in the day the term 'twiggy shit' was frequently used for 'tat'.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/170129694940788/posts/936479551639128/

This guy...