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To: LindyBill who wrote (21068)	1/23/1999 12:27:00 AM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 77397

Off Topic,with a capital O and T. LindyBill, "That's a guy who totes tea. (Don't You whippersnapper's know anything?)" Yours was the common reply to this question, as most people believe that it means "A tea toting abstainer of alcoholic beverages." The implication here being, that the individual would rather drink tea than something more spirited. While some abstainers may tote tea, all tea toters are not abstinent. Searching the etymology of this term yields some interesting findings, going back to the 1830s. Among other things, a teetotaler is one who practices teetotalism [Merriam Webster at m-w.com ]. My Latin Teacher in High School [this had nothing to do with Latin, btw] told us that a teetotaler was someone known to teetotal. This was someone who practiced total abstinence, and the T in Teetotal was spelt with a capital "T," for emphasis. -- Here's what I come up with from From Random House's " Jesse's Word of the Day" page [ truthmachine.com ], which tends to corroborate my teacher's explanation after all these years: =============== A writer to Jesse at Random House writes: While browsing an Irish travel page, I ran across a word unknown to me: "teetotaler." It was in reference to children, and I was wondering if the playground toy, the teeter-totter, is a corruption of the word. Any information on this would be be appreciated. The word teetotaler has nothing to do with the playground apparatus known as a teeter-totter (or sometimes as a see-saw). However, since you don't provide the example, I can't tell what the word is supposed to mean in your context. The only sense of teetotaler and its relations that you're likely to encounter is 'a person who completely abstains from alcoholic beverages'. This word was apparently coined by temperance workers in the 1830s in England. While earlier supporters of temperance had encouraged the abstention from hard liquor only, the 1830s movement encouraged a complete abstention from all alcoholic beverages, including champagne, beer, and wine. The total element of this word is the familiar word total, as in "total abstinence." The tee is a written representation of the pronounciation of the letter t in total: the initial letter is repeated as a form of emphasis. This type of repetition is known as reduplication; in English it is comparatively rare, but it is a regular feature, carrying grammatical information, in many other languages. While the existing evidence shows that teetotal in senses referring to alcoholic abstinence developed in England the 1830s, there was slightly earlier American evidence for the adverb teetotally 'totally; completely' (also found in an exaggerated form as teetotaciously). It has also been claimed that teetotal was coined in a New York temperance society in the 1820s, but the evidence of this has not been found. Some of the various words in this family are teetotal 'of, relating to, or practicing complete alcoholic abstinence'; teetotally 'in a teetotal manner'; teetotalism 'the complete abstinence from alcohol'; teetotalist and much more usually teetotal(l)er 'one who practices teetotalism', and a few others, most of which were also first used in the 1830s. The earlier word teetotum 'a four-sided top used in a game', from a reduplication of Latin totum 'all; whole', after the letter t (for totum) inscribed on one of the sides of the top, is probably just a coincidence. ==================================== Why heck! Maybe it did have something to do with Latin, after all! Regards, Frank Coluccio