Dictionary

antipledge en · ADJ

Etymology

From anti- + pledge.

Meanings

1. Opposed to a particular pledge.
   • Supporters of the pledge took a two-to-one lead over their opponents, although the contest was closer in Flint and Detroit, where antipledge votes reached almost 45 percent of all those cast. 2003, Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor's War At Home: The CIO In World War II, page 196:
   • It was an issue of great personal importance to young men who thought they might be drafted, and possibly killed, in a war they regarded as immoral. Janis and Rausch (1970) tested for selective exposure to propledge and antipledge communications among four different kinds of Yale students: those who immediately refused to sign the , those who refused after some deliberation, those who favored the pledge and said they might sign, and those who had already signed it. 1978, Jonathan L. Freedman, David O. Sears, J. Merrill Carlsmith, Social Psychology, page 363:
   • This bloc of "real brothers" engages in a struggle with antipledge movements for the hearts, minds, and bodies of entering members. 2015, Ricky L. Jones, Black Haze, page 103:
   • In the antebellum years, both temperance opponents, in their antipledge writings, and reformers themselves, in their drunkard narratives , expressed deep concern about the nature of influence and worried that it could potentially interrupt its object's volition and become coercion. 2009, Elaine Frantz Parsons, Manhood Lost: Fallen Drunkards and Redeeming Women in the Nineteenth-Century United States, page 57:

Forms

Antonyms

propledge

antipledge en · NOUN

Etymology

From anti- + pledge.

Meanings

1. A pledge taken in explicit opposition to a more commonly taken pledge.
   • In the 1970s, white antibusing activists in Boston recited an antipledge: “We will not pledge allegiance to the order of the United States District Court, nor the dictatorship for which it stands; one order, under Garrity, with liberty and justice for none.” 2011, Jill Lepore, The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History:

Forms