Teetotum

A teetotum (or T-totum) is a form of spinning top most commonly used for gambling games. It has a polygonal body marked with letters or numbers, which indicate the result of each spin.^[1]^[2] Usage goes back to (at least) ancient Greeks and Romans, with the popular put and take gambling version going back to medieval times.^[2] A perinola is a six-sided top with similar gameplay most commonly used in Latin America.

Description

In its earliest form, the body was square (in some cases via a stick through a regular six-sided die^[3]), marked on the four sides by the letters A (Lat. aufer, take), indicating that the player takes one from the pool, D (Lat. depone, put down) when a fine has to be paid, N (Lat. nihil, nothing), and T (Lat. totum, all), when the whole pool is to be taken.^[4]

Other accounts give such letters as P, N, D (dimidium, half), and H or T or other combinations of letters.^[4] Some other combinations that could be found were NG, ZS, TA, TG, NH, ND, SL and M, which included the Latin terms Zona Salve ("save all"), Tibi Adfer ("take all"), Nihil Habeas ("nothing left"), Solve L ("save 50") and Nihil Dabis ("nothing happens").

Joseph Strutt, who was born in 1749, mentions the teetotum as used in games when he was a boy:^[4]

When I was a boy, the tee-totum had only four sides, each of them marked with a letter; a T for take all; an H for half, that is of the stake; an N for nothing; and a P for put down, that is, a stake equal to that you put down at first. Toys of this kind are now made with many sides and letters.^[5]

The teetotum was later adapted into dreidel, a Jewish game played at Hanukkah, and as the perinola, a game played in many Latin American countries. The dreidel typically has four sides" N (נ‎) for nothing; G (ג‎) for take all; H (ה‎) for take half, and S (ש‎) or P (פֹּ‎) for put one in. These letters form an acronym, in Hebrew, which recalls the miracle for which the holy day is celebrated; and, in Yiddish, which explains the rules of the game.

The perinola typically has six sides: toma uno or take one, toma dos or take two, toma todo or take all, pon uno or add one, pon dos or add two, todos ponen or everyone adds one to the pot.

Some modern teetotums have six or eight sides, and are used in commercial board games in place of dice. The original 1860 version of The Game of Life used a teetotum in order to avoid the die's association with gambling.

A girl holding up a four-sided teetotum on Pieter Brueghel's Children's Games (1560)
A twelve-sided teetotum

Put and take

In the United Kingdom, the same game with a six-sided die is called "put and take", the sides of the die are- "Put one", "Take one", "Put two", "Take two", "All put" (every player puts in) and "Take all". This is usually played for small stakes (e.g. "one" is one British penny) as amusement rather than to win money.

In literature

A teetotum is mentioned by "Martinus Scriblerus",^[5] the pen name of a club of 18th-century satirical writers.

In Louisa May Alcott's Rose in Bloom, a character learning to dance says, "A fellow must have some reward for making a teetotum of himself."

Virginia Woolf, in her novel The Voyage Out, has Hewett say to Hearst: "I see a thing like a teetotum spinning in and out – knocking into things – dashing from side to side – collecting numbers – more and more and more, till the whole place is thick with them."

The 19th-century English poet William Ernest Henley wrote the Double Ballade on the Nothingness of Things which opened with the lines:

The big teetotum twirls,
And epochs wax and wane
As chance subsides or swirls;
But of the loss and gain
The sum is always plain.
Read on the mighty pall,
The weed of funeral
That covers praise and blame,
The -isms and the -anities,
Magnificence and shame:—
'O Vanity of Vanities!'^[6]

In Lewis Carroll's fantasy Through the Looking-Glass, Alice's movements about the Old Sheep Shop provoke its proprietor (the White Queen transformed into a sheep) to ask, "Are you a child, or a teetotum?"

In Dickens' Our Mutual Friend a line of strange-looking wooden objects sticking out of the river near the Plashwater Weir Mill Lock is described as being "like huge teetotums standing at rest in the water". (Book IV, chapter 1)

In Edgar Allan Poe's 1845 dark comedy short story The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether, one of the patients of the asylum is described as believing he had been converted into a "tee-totum":^[7]

"And then," said the friend who had whispered, "there was Boullard, the tee-totum. I call him the tee-totum because, in fact, he was seized with the droll but not altogether irrational crotchet, that he had been converted into a tee-totum. You would have roared with laughter to see him spin. He would turn round upon one heel by the hour, in this manner – so-
Here the friend whom he had just interrupted by a whisper, performed an exactly similar office for himself.

References

^ Chisholm 1911, p. 503.
^ ^a ^b Teetotum at the Encyclopædia Britannica
^ Teetotum at A.Word.A.Day
^ ^a ^b ^c Chisholm 1911, p. 504.
^ ^a ^b Strutt, Joseph (1903) [1801]. Cox, J Charles (ed.). The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England. London: Methuen. p. 305.
^ Henley, William Ernest (1907). Poems. London: David Nutt. p. 94.
^ "The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether" on poestories.com

Sources

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Teetotum". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 26 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 503–504.