Teetotaler

May I confess something to you? I’ve always thought the word teetotaler referred to someone who drank a lot of alcohol, when in fact it means someone who abstains from it. My misunderstanding had been that I saw the word “totaled” there, which conjured images of “wrecked,” or quite drunk. I knew it had something to do with drinking but I was completely turned around about the word’s meaning.

This explains so much. And the revelation arrived justly, at like 3 a.m. today, after a bout of heavy drinking.

I haven’t been this linguistically pantsless since that day in the mid-’90s when I realized with a start that magnanimous doesn’t actually mean large.