What Is The Origin Of (174)?…
Teetotal
Don’t worry, I haven’t signed the pledge but I was musing over teetotal, the description for complete abstinence from alcohol the other day, and realised I hadn’t a clue where it came from. So, with a glass of vino by my side, I decided to find out.
The standard textbook answer, and a tombstone testifies to the story, is that it was the brainchild of one Richard Turner, an illiterate fish hawker. In 1832, half-cut he attended a local temperance meeting in the Lancashire town of Preston, as you do. He was so impressed with what he heard, he signed up and, indeed, was one of the founding Seven Men of Preston who advocated total abstinence, not just foregoing spirits. In a tub-thumping speech he delivered to a meeting in September 1833, Turner is reported to have said, “nothing but the tee-total would do.” Whether he had a stutter, as some of his opponents claimed, or whether in his fervour he added a t at the beginning of the word as an intensifier is unclear but the word caught on in temperance circles. The Preston Temperance Advertiser attributed the neologism to Turner and when he died in 1846, his tombstone recorded his gift to the English language.
Charming as this story is, I can’t help there is a touch of H L Mencken and the bathtub about it. My problem is that there was an adverb, tee-totally, in popular usage before Turner got on his steady hind legs. The first example to support this argument is to be found in the Chester Chronicle of 7th September 1810. There we find the correspondent reporting; “Mr Plane said, he differed tee-totally from the attorney in his last assertion.” The Irish newspaper, the Waterford Chronicle, reported on 23rd February 1828; “They should put one into Parliament that would put down the Corporation tee totally..” The Dublin Evening Post of 27th November 1832 reports verbatim a speech in which the orator said, “therefore it is that I pronounce it to be tee totally impossible to procure an honest man in the Corporation.”
That it was used in colloquial Irish speech is evidenced in this verbatim description of a dust-up, reported by the Limerick Evening Post of 30th November 1832; “in which I received this black eye, and had the skirts reefed tee totally off the cover-me-decently..” And we come across the word as an adjective rather than an adverb in the 17th September 1832 edition of Saunder’s News-Letter, a Dublin periodical; “I know every bird that comes to the coast, and this is a tee-total stranger.” Just four years later, tee-totally made an appearance in the Nova Scotian writer, Thomas Chandler Haliburton’s The Clockmaker, where he wrote; “I hope I may be tee-totally ruinated, if I’d take eight hundred dollars from him.”
So what are we to make of all this? Many of the examples cited predate Turner’s supposed usage and suggest that teetotal and teetotally were part of colloquial speech, particularly amongst the Irish, around that time. Teetotally means completely and utterly and was used in a range of contexts without any specific or even vague reference to alcohol. Turner may have been the first to use the word in the context of the temperance movement and the added emphasis given to the word by the intensifier tee would have perhaps suited his rhetorical style but it is clear that he didn’t invent it. Perhaps more relevant is the fact that it was used in the proceedings of the Irish Trades’ Political Union in late 1832 of which northern working men, whether literate or not, would have been aware.
Sorry to pour a bucket of cold stout over a charming story.
