| 释义 |
teetotal, a. (n.)|tiːˈtəʊtəl|
Also erron. tea-.
[A kind of emphasizing reduplication or extension of the word total: see Note below.]
1. Of or pertaining to total abstinence from alcoholic drinks; pledged to, or devoted to the furtherance of, total abstinence.
1834Preston Temperance Advocate Apr. 29/2 (Letter signed) A Lover of Sociality, and a ‘Tee-Total’ Abstainer. Ibid. 30/2 He..is now a tee-total abstinence member, and is an ornament to the Society. Ibid. May 38/2 The same man has since..signed the tee-total pledge. Ibid. Sept. 65/2 The tee-total system is a saving of time, a saving of money. 1837Ibid. Apr. 29/1 A request, that a return should be made from all the tee-total societies in the kingdom. 1837Barham Let. in Life (1871), And surely the captain Won't think of adapting His taste to these teetotal fancies. 1840Dr. W. Patton in Jrnl. Amer. Temp. Union June 87 Total abstinence from all intoxicating drinks is a principle of English manufacture... So they adopted what they call the teetotal pledge (though I don't like the name); and they sent that back to us. 1885J. Runciman Skippers & Sh. 14 You've made me be teetotal for three months. 1899Allbutt's Syst. Med. VIII. 234 Much stress has been laid by teetotal advocates on the paramount influence of parental intemperance on the procreation of a mentally deficient progeny.
2. dial. Absolute, complete, perfect, entire. (More emphatic than total.) Cf. teetotally.
1840Marryat Olla Podr., S.W. and by W., A man in Bedlam is a very useless member of society, and a tee-total non-productive. 1849J. O'Connell Parl. Recoll. II. 136 The Corn Law Abolitionists—the Teetotal men..of course saw through Sir Robert Peel's speech at once. 1884Lays & Leg. N. Irel. 69 The Divil well knowin'..his teetotal want av contrition.
B. n. (The adj. used absol.; now rare or dial.)
a. The total abstinence principle or pledge; teetotalism; a society for the promotion of total abstinence.
b. A total abstainer; a teetotaller. rare.
1834Preston Temp. Adv. May 38/1 The number of members is about 196: the tee-totals about 30. Ibid. Nov. 85/1 Every system that does not go on the basis of tee-total is quackery. Ibid. Oct. 77/2 Mr. H. Snell..then came forward and signed the tee-total. Ibid. Nov. 83/2 There is no remedy for the sufferings of the working classes except joining the tee-total. 1845Disraeli Sybil ii. x, Glass of water for the Secretary of the Mowbray Temperance and Teetotal. 1855O. W. Holmes Poems 200 Statesmen grow merry, lean attorneys laugh, And weak teetotals warm to half and half. 1857J. Stewart Sk. Scot. Charac., etc. 149 (E.D.D.), I maun join the Teetotal.
Hence teeˈtotal v., intr. to practise or advocate total abstinence; whence teeˈtotalling ppl. a.
1839Brit. Critic No. 50. 267 The case of Timothy..is..made a text for ‘tee-totalling’ discourses. 1843Fraser's Mag. XXVII. 408 The regular..religious and teetotalling artisan. 1883Cambridge Staircase iii. 37 We all indulge in intoxicants..except Westbury, who teetotals.
[Note. The most specific account of this word is that it was first used (in sense 1) by a working-man, Richard Turner of Preston, about September, 1833, in a speech advocating total abstinence from intoxicating liquors, in preference to abstinence from ardent spirits only, as practised by some early temperance reformers. Among those present on the occasion was Mr. Joseph Livesey, one of the ‘Seven men of Preston’, who there formed the first Total Abstinence Society on 22 March 1832, and in whose Autobiography (1867–8), included in his Life & Labours by John Pearce (1885), particulars will be found. The Preston Temperance Advocate, a monthly magazine started by Mr. Livesey in Jan. 1834, shows the rapid advance of ‘Dicky Turner's word’ from a humorous or allusive to a fully adopted term (see quots. above). The issue for April 1836 has a full-page portrait of ‘Dicky Turner, now celebrated as being the author of the word Tee-total’. This statement is also made on his tomb-stone at Preston, where he died 27 Oct. 1846. It has been suggested that Turner only used a word colloquially current in Lancashire in the general sense 2. But to this the whole tenor of contemporary evidence is opposed: and the examples of tee-total in sense 2 in the Eng. Dialect Dictionary are all of much later date. But there is proof that the adverb tee-totally, as an emphasized form of totally, was used in U.S. in 1832, and it has also been said to have been common in Ireland from a much earlier date. Totally is much more frequent in colloquial use than total, and it is quite possible that it was strengthened to tee-totally much earlier, and that tee-total in the specific sense arose independently, and without any knowledge of the adverb. It has also been asserted that, in the total abstinence sense, the word arose at Lansing, New York, in Jan. 1827, from the use on pledge cards of T. to indicate ‘total’, and the consequent collocation ‘T.-total’. This is particularly stated in the Century Dictionary 1891, on the authority of the Rev. Joel Jewell, but without any contemporary evidence; while the correspondence in the Life of Livesey above mentioned (Pt. i. cviii–cxv) shows that the total abstinence movement in U.S., and with it the use of teetotal, followed and was greatly influenced by the Preston movement. By Worcester, 1846, teetotal is called ‘a modern cant word’, the letter T standing for temperance: ‘that is temperance-totalism’; for it reference is made only to British periodicals. So to Webster 1847 Tee-totaler was ‘a cant word formed in England’. Cf. 1840 in sense 1.] |