c.1874 lithograph by Currier and Ives, titled “Woman’s Holy War. Grand Charge on the Enemy’s Works.” A young woman in armor, bearing an axe and a shield with the stars and stripes and astride a charging horse, leads a group of similarly armed women as they shatter barrels of liquor.
6 June 2022
[Edited 8 June 2022, adding references to tee-totally as characteristic of Irish speech.]
Teetotal refers to the complete abstinence from alcoholic drinks, or more generally from any intoxicant. But it has not always been that specific. The word began its life as simply an emphatic way to say total, what etymologists call reduplication, the repetition of a sound for rhetorical effect. Tee-totally seems to have been an element in the dialect of the north of England and Ireland.
The earliest use that I know of is in the form of the adverb tee-totally that appeared in the Chester Chronicle of 7 September 1810 in a letter detailing a debate over the origin of the name of the town Thornton-le-Moors:
Mr. Plane said, “he differed tee-totally from the attorney in his last assertion, whom he was sorry to see so deficient in the history of his country.”
We see it again in the novel The Man-of-War’s Man, which was serialized in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1821:
But come, shipmates, dang it I’ll follow my old plan wid you—open all of you your fists, so, and let’s have a squint at them—for I’ll be teetotally d—d, if Matt. Higgins shall allow either a tailor or any other loblolly to enter his crew without his knowledge.
And there is this which appeared in the London periodical The Age of 14 March 1830. It purports to be an accurate transcription of a speech given by Anglo-Irish, Tory MP John Wilson Croker on 12 March, but it is almost certainly written by the editors portraying Croker as a comic Irishman. The topic of the speech is the system of benefices enjoyed by the clergy of the Church of England:
But says the young Lord Grizzle—Howich I mane—but I’m always thinkin of the names invinted for his ould progenitor in the John Bull—says he, ’tis a whole downright sinecure that ought to be ’bolisht teetotally, and not tacked as a selvage to no sort of office at all.
The adverb tee-totally appears in the American press by 3 September 1830, when the New-York Spectator published a series of five letters on the congressional elections of that year. As with the transcript published in The Age, these letters appear to be inventions by the Spectator’s editors. All five all bear the signature of men named John Smith, differing only in their middle names. This one is purportedly by a John Snag Smith:
You need not, if you value the character of your paper for consistency, which I believe you do, lay any flattering unction to the souls of the Clay men about the election in this State. It has tee-totally gone for Jackson. You can’t see a Clay man any where.
The reference to Clay is to the Whig/Republican Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky, a political rival to the Democratic President Andrew Jackson.
We also see the word in a piece originally published in the Germantown Telegraph and reprinted in the Poughkeepsie, New York Independence on 24 April 1833. It’s from a speech purportedly given in Illinois calling for a war against the local Indigenous tribes:
Yes gentlemen and feller citizen sodjirs! my soul rises spontanaciously as I contaminat the glorious event that must extinguish our names in the heart of our countrymen till time shall be no more! Our excess in this experdition is sartin; it is a mere sarcumstance! The planos will be aroused, and we will all fight on ’em bodiaciously, and tee totally abflisticate ’em off the face of the yearth!
And it appears in Samuel Lover’s 1834 story Barny O’Reardon, the Navigator:
You’re a good sayman for that same, says he, an’ it would be right at any other time than this present, says he, but it’s onpossible now, tee-totally, on account o’ the war, says he.
These last two are clearly meant to portray a stereotypical Irish dialect.
Finally, we see the adjective tee total by 25 July 1835, when it appears in Portland, Maine’s Eastern Argus in a political context:
The Bangor Courier has a long article to prove that the British government is purer and better than ours. The editor thought so, we suppose, in the last war, when he took sides with the invaders of our soil, and ministered to their physical wants. This Samuel Upton is a tee total “Whig”—no mistake.
The fact that many of these early citations of use are from fictional sources or invented snippets of dialect does not matter for our purposes. It’s still a word, and in early use teetotal and teetotally was strongly associated with dialectal speech, first in the north of England, and then spreading, perhaps by sailors, to Ireland and the American frontier.
The association of teetotal with the temperance movement seems to have begun in September 1833 when a Richard Turner is said to have given a speech advocating total abstinence from alcohol in Preston, Lancashire, England, but no record or transcript of the speech was made. The word was picked up by the Preston Temperance Advocate and used multiple times the next year in reference to abstinence—the Oxford English Dictionary has a number of 1834 citations of the word from that paper. As a result, it became a well-established term within the British temperance movement.
By 1835 the use of teetotal became a fixture of the American temperance movement as well. In January of that year, Boston’s Temperance Journal reprinted a series of testimonies that has originally appeared in the Preston Temperance Advocate. One of them reads:
I then signed the moderation pledge, and in about ten days after I signed the tee-total, and can say solemnly, that nothing that can intoxicate has entered my mouth, except on sacramental occasions, since that time.
So, both the generic, dialectal, and emphatic use of teetotal and its specific application by the temperance movement started in the north of England before spreading to North America and beyond, albeit at slightly different times.
Sources:
“The Bathing Boat” (Letter, 27 August 1810). The Chester Chronicle (England), 7 September 1810, 4. Newspapers.com.
“The Church.” The Age (London), 14 March 1830, 4. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century UK Periodicals.
“Flowers of Rhetoric.” Independence (Poughkeepsie, New York), 24 April 1833, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Lover, Samuel. “Barny O’Reardon, the Navigator.” Legends and Stories of Ireland, second series. London: Baldwin and Cradock, 1834, 50–51. Nineteenth Century Collections Online.
“The Man-of-War’s Man.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, November 1821, 424.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. teetotal, adj. and n., teetotally, adv.1.
“Reformed Drunkards.” Temperance Journal (Boston), January 1835, 1. Gale Primary Sources: American Historical Periodicals from the American Antiquarian Society.
Smith, John Snag (pseudonym). “Western Elections.” Letter (12 August 1830). New-York Spectator, 3 September 1830, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
“Summary of News.” Eastern Argus (Portland, Maine), 25 July 1835, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Tréguer, Pascal. “The Authentic Origin of the Word ‘Teetotal.’” Wordhistories.net, 12 January 2017.
Image credit: c.1874, Currier and Ives. Library of Congress. Public domain image.