Prompted by this question (How old is “Bollocks!”?), I wonder why it's so often "old bollocks".
Where I live (South-East England), "giving it all that old bollocks" is a fairly common expression in certain circles. That's probably quite localised dialect, but googling the net suggests that a load of old bollocks, the same old bollocks and other old variants are quite common in the world at large.
When people say "Don't give me that old crap!", it normally means they've heard your line before, and don't want to hear it again. But I don't get that implication of repetition with old bollocks.
With "That's a load of old bollocks!" I can discard "a load of" and/or "old". None of the variants seem to imply I've heard it before. I don't feel quite so comfortable with "That's old bollocks!" though - maybe I only accept it at all because it sounds like "That's all bollocks!"
I hear plenty of "That's balls!", but they never seem to be old. Why is this?