Word of the day: teetotal
There was a temperance movement in the early 1800s in England, and it spread to the US by the 1820s. Before that, alcohol was widely used as a beverage, a medicine, and even, in the case of beer, nourishment. Water was often unsafe to drink, and other beverages (milk, for example) weren’t necessarily available, and were difficult to keep fresh. Not that drunkenness wasn’t frowned upon, of course; that was still seen as going too far. But as early as the late 1700s articles and books began to be written pointing out the drawbacks to using alcohol at all.
There was probably an economic reason for attitudes to change; the industrial revolution had begun, and if you were using some of the new machinery that was appearing, you’d better stay pretty sharp or you’d get hurt.
In 1833, one of the advocates of abstinence, Richard “Dicky” Turner, gave a speech to a temperance meeting in Preston, Lancashire, and reportedly said something like “I’ll be reet out-and-out t-total for ever and ever.” The local temperance movement had its own journal, the Preston Temperance Advisor, and it picked up on the word “t-total”, or “teetotal.” That’s where the word “teetotal” came to represent abstention from drinking alcohol.
But there’s a bit of a question about the whole thing. What isn’t recorded is whether Turner accidentally stuttered on the word “total,” whether he invented a word by using a leading additional “t” as an intensifier, or whether he’d heard the word before. The thing is, “teetotally” was already in use, at least in the US, and is mentioned in James Hall’s Legends of the West in 1832: “[Kentucky backwoodsman says] These Mingoes..ought to be essentially, and particularly, and tee-totally obflisticated off of the face of the whole yearth.” Although nobody has found an earlier printed example, there’s a theory that “teetotally” had been around for a long time and was originally used in Ireland.
In the case of “teetotally,” the extra “tee” is clearly used as an intensifier. So it’s possible that Dicky Turner already knew he word (or knew of it) in 1833. Except that on the other hand… Turner was illiterate. Before he became a leading light of the temperance movement, he was a fishmonger, and wouldn’t have ever noticed “teetotally” in Legends of the West because he couldn’t read it. What happened was that he stumbled into a temperance meeting when he was half drunk, meaning to go as a joke, but they convinced him instead. He became one of the Seven Men of Preston who were important advocates for the movement.
The word “teetotaller” is still in use today, thanks to Dicky Turner. In addition to changing careers from selling fish to motivational speaker, he’s also unique in one other way. He’s buried in St. Peter’s churchyard in Preston, and is probably the only person who both popularized a new word and had that word inscribed on his tombstone.
