My wife was working a crossword puzzle and asked me what toper means. Reading and years of arduous research had prepared me with the answer: a noun meaning a drunk, one who drinks to excess. Dr. Johnson’s definition is straightforward: “a drunkard.” The OED is more expansive: “one who topes or drinks a great deal; a hard drinker; a drunkard.” Dickens used it in Martin Chuzzlewit and Wodehouse in The Mating Season. The Dictionary adds two rare variations: toperdom and toperism. The latter sounds like a religion and for some of us it was.
The verb
form – to tope – was new to me: “to
drink, esp. to drink copiously and
habitually.” Its origin is “obscure.” The OED
records no uses since the nineteenth century, and the word seems strictly
British, never American. English is ripe with synonyms for drinking, drunk and
drunks.
The mother
lode for such words is Brian Rea’s Intoxerated:
The Definitive Drinker’s Dictionary (Melville House, 2009). Rea assembles 2,985
synonyms for seemingly every nuance of intoxication. Some of my favorites: “staying late
at the office,” “heroic,” “T.U.B.B.” (“tits up but breathing”), “back teeth
afloat,” “been too free with Sir John Strawberry” and “Betty Ford-ed.” Such is
the wisdom of the folk – thus, folk poetry, much of it better than what passes
for the certified stuff.
3 comments:
Your mention of the Doctor makes me think of a book I ordered today: "Johnsonian and Other Essays and Reviews" by R. W. Chapman (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1953). 243 pages. Chapman's two great interests seem to have been Samuel Johnson and Jane Austen. Should be interesting.
A 20th century use of the verb "tope" appears in the Flanders and Swann song of seduction, "Have Some Madeira, M'Dear": "Unaware of the wiles of the snake-in-the-grass / And the fate of the maiden who topes, / She lowered her standards by raising her glass, / Her courage, her eyes, and his hopes."
I first ran across it back in the Seventies in Winston Graham's Black Moon, the fifth book in his Poldark saga. Morwenna Whitworth is in a state of decline owing to a difficult childbirth and the persistent attentions of her husband, the Rev. Osborne Whitworth. A sympathetic Doctor Enys prescribes porter with every meal: "Good God, man! You'll turn her into a toper!" exclaims an outraged Ossie. I duly looked it up and added it to the treasury of British words seldom seen in American novels. (I also had to look up "porter"; we don't see that word much either.)
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