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Comment by gadders | Hacker News Reader

When did "sober" take over from "teetotal" for someone who will long-term abstain from alcohol?

I'm sober right now but won't be tonight when I have a couple of glasses of wine in front of the TV.

"Sober" is commonly used by recovering/recovered alcoholics to mean they are no longer drinking. It implies that they were drinking too much, to the point where intoxication was a semi-permanent state. I've heard the word used this way for decades and I'm pretty sure it goes back farther.

Twelve-step groups have been using ''sober'' and ''sobriety'' for almost 100 years. In this day and age its surprising to see some confusion about what those terms can mean.

To be fair, I've never had an issue with drinking. I stopped in my mid twenties and haven't a drink in 20 years. But I never say I'm "sober" since that kind of insinuates it was a problem at one point. If someone offers me a drink, I just say "no thanks I don't drink."

I'm sober, both in the immediate sense and in the sense that I haven't had a drink in 23 years. I know that drinking is not a good thing for me, for many reasons.

If you want to go home and have a beer or whatever - have a good time. If you want to go to the bar later and have a drink - maybe I'll go with you and sip a fancy mocktail or something, we can take turns buying rounds. If you want to get wasted and party all night - have fun, I had a lot of fun nights that way (please don't drive though).

I'm not opposed to anyone else's drinking. I just know I can't.

Teetotal implies an opposition to all alcohol use. A teetotaler is against you drinking. I'm not opposed to that at all, I just choose for myself to be sober, for a myriad of personal reasons.

I think of “teetotallers” as being vocal about their abstaining, some to the point of strident abolitionism. Whereas my “sober” friends seem to speak of that more as a personal condition than a zealous cause.

I’ve gotten the sense from twelve-step types of friends that, for them, the “sober” sobriquet goes along with this idea that an alcoholic is never “cured”: that sobriety is always contingent, and that they’re always one drink away from sliding back to “a drunk” again.

For a causal linguistic reason, my guess is it's because sober is a fairly common word otherwise and is very easily pronounced, whereas teetotal is much weirder to say and has a pretty specific meaning, so one may go a long time without seeing or hearing it enough to really stick.

The etymology is also strange - it originally meant "T-total" abstinence from alcohol as in "total with a capital T". A funny word, we probably could have done better.

"Sober" in this context means "having overcome a dangerous alcohol habit/addiction". Pretty standard alcoholic terminology. Furthermore, much as they might enjoy a drink, alcoholics who have "gone sober" MUST abstain, as alcoholism is seen as lifelong once acquired and the risk of lapsing into self-destructive behavior is too great after even just one drink.

"Teetotaler" usually refers to a person who abstains from alcohol on general principles (does not like the effects, taste, thinks it's a moral vice, etc.).

"teetol" has two additional connotations beyond simply "no alcohol" for some readers/listeners:

  ** abstaining from caffeine also
  ** has a religious motivation (e.g. mormons)

Similarly, I've considered describing myself as "straight-edge", but that has the connotation (for some) of being disapproving/judgemental of drinkers.

sober simply means "not drunk", so using it for "haven't been drunk for X amount of time" isn't that extraordinary

and looking at google ngram, teetotal is just a much rarer word out of the two (like 100x), so it's just more likely to not get transmitted down the generations (I certainly do not know how to use it)

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