The upshot is what everything finally came to — the result you are left with after all the talking, arguing, or trying. It almost always appears in one phrase: 'the upshot is…' or 'the upshot was…'. You tell a long, complicated story, and then you say 'the upshot is, we're not going.' The word does a specific job. It is a signal to the listener: the messy part is over, here is the part that matters to you. That is why people use it when the road to the result was tangled. Nobody says 'I pressed the button and the upshot was the light came on.' They say it after a meeting that ran three hours, after weeks of emails, after a family argument. Long story, short ending. It sounds slightly educated but not stiff — comfortable in news writing and in ordinary adult conversation. It is a countable noun, but it almost never appears in the plural. It is nearly always singular and nearly always after 'the'. The origin is charming and worth telling students: it came from archery, where the upshot was the final arrow shot in a match — the one that decided who won. The last shot became 'the deciding outcome'. That older, literal meaning is long gone from everyday English; only the figure of speech survives.