opened with the lines: 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": "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. 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. See also Long dice (esp. "Lang Larence") References Sources External links Gaming devices Tops