antipledge

English

Etymology

From anti- +‎ pledge.

Adjective

antipledge (comparative more antipledge, superlative most antipledge)

1. Opposed to a particular pledge.

   Antonym: propledge

   • 1978, Jonathan L. Freedman, David O. Sears, J. Merrill Carlsmith, Social Psychology, page 363:

     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.

   • 2003, Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor's War At Home: The CIO In World War II, page 196:

     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.

   • 2009, Elaine Frantz Parsons, Manhood Lost: Fallen Drunkards and Redeeming Women in the Nineteenth-Century United States, page 57:

     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.

   • 2015, Ricky L. Jones, Black Haze, page 103:

     This bloc of "real brothers" engages in a struggle with antipledge movements for the hearts, minds, and bodies of entering members.

Noun

antipledge (plural antipledges)

1. A pledge taken in explicit opposition to a more commonly taken pledge.
   • 2011, Jill Lepore, The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History:

     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.”