No, lol. But I’ll give you the background, then try.
First, note that “total acidity” (at least to my knowledge) is a wine term (or, I think, more generically a food science term), not so much a chemistry term. So I’m going by the definitions I read in wine texts, not anything I learned studying chemistry.
I’ll go really basic (haha) to start, for anyone not at all familiar with what “acidity” means in the chemistry sense (apologies to many who do). An acid is any compound that has the ability to release a hydrogen ion (also, and often, called a proton). A hydrogen ion is just a hydrogen atom that’s missing it’s lone electron. The acid molecule that let go of the hydrogen ion hangs on to that electron, and so becomes a negatively charged ion (called an anion). Just to complete the picture, the opposite of an acid is a “base”, meaning a compound that has a greater tendency to grab on to an extra hydrogen ion (and thus become a positively charged ion, a “cation”; which, btw, are the roots of cathode and anode in vacuum tubes). Acids are easy to identify, they usually have the word “acid” associated: acetic acid, hydrochloric acid, tartaric acid, etc. Bases are not typically as easy to identify, they don’t often get the word “base” associated with them. The base most people will know is ammonia. Or hydroxide, as in Sodium Hydroxide. And, of course, the well known first base, second base, and third base.
When you put an acid in water, some of the acid will separate (the chemistry term is dissociate) into a hydrogen ion, and it’s partner anion. How much dissociates is a measure of the strength of the acid. Strong acids dissociate substantially, creating a lot of protons and anions, while weak acids dissociate only a little. Hydrochloric acid is a strong acid, meaning when you dissolve HCl in water, almost all of it dissociates to form H+ and Cl- ions. Acetic acid is a relatively weak acid, meaning it will only dissociate a little bit, so most of it is in the form CH3COOH, with just a small concentration of H+ and CH3COO- ions. That’s why you can pour vinegar on your hands without destroying them, but not hydrochloric acid. Carbonic acid is also weak, so you can spill soda and not get acid burns.
To describe the “acidity” of a solution, we use the concentration of protons. The more dissociated protons floating around, the stronger the acidity of that solution. You could just use the straight concentration, in, say, g/liter to specify acidity (we note the concentration of a species with brackets, in this case [H+], or [H] for short). But because the concentration can range over a very high range of values, from many grams/liter, to micro or nanograms/liter, that’s an awkward way to write numerical values. Instead, we like to use the logarithm of the concentration, which puts the values in the range of small integers. Taking the log of a value is notated with a lower case “p” (which seems unique to chemistry, it’s not a general math expression). Put it all together, and you get the shorthand notation pH, the full definition of which is pH = -log[H]. The negative sign is there because without it, pH would be a negative value for most solutions of acids, and we don’t like having to drag a “-” sign around all the time. So the lower the numerical value of pH, the more acidic the solution is. pH=7 is “neutral”, i.e., the concentration of hydrogen ions in plain water (there are some, water has a tiny tendency to dissociate and form H+ and OH- ions). pH of wine is typically in the 3s. Coca Cola has a pH of about 2.5. Each integer pH step is a factor of 10 in acidity. pH of 0 is quite a strong acid. A negative pH is a very strong acidic solution. pH greater than 7 is lower in acidity than plain water, we call that a “basic” solution, and the way to think about it is that the concentration of the base (the compound with high affinity for protons) is high enough that it scavenges all the lone hydrogen ions, and then takes some more from water molecules, leaving an excess of OH- hydroxide ions. A bottle of household ammonia has a pH of about 12 (I think). Bleach and oven cleaner will be higher, in the range of 13-14, so just as dangerous as a strong acid with pH of 0, just not in the same way. One more subtlety that I won’t go into is that when we talk about concentration, we use the concept of “molarity”, which is a way of expressing the number of atoms, or molecules, or ions per liter of solution, instead of the number of grams per liter - something that should annoy any chemist when it comes to “total acidity”, expressed in g/l.
The pH of a solution depends on how strong the acid (or base) is, how much of it is dissolved, and other factors like temperature, other components in the solution, etc. It’s a very indirect measure of how much of a particular acid is dissolved, not an absolute measure of the total concentration of acid in solution. Which is where Total Acidity comes in. TA is (from what I’m able to determine, I still haven’t found a clean, succinct definition), the total number of hydrogen ions available in the solution (wine, in this case). In some way (most commonly by titration I think, or more accurately by spectroscopy), you determine the absolute concentration of all the acids, and thus the number of protons they have available (some acids are diprotic, meaning they have two available dissociable hydrogen ions, or even triprotic; how “acidic” they are is complicated, and the second proton will be far less “acidic” once the first one is dissociated, but TA doesn’t care about that, it’s just counting them all). Once you have the total number of protons available, from all the acids, you turn that into an “equivalent”, I believe most commonly using tartaric acid as the reference. So you would calculate how many grams of tartaric acid would be needed to supply all the dissociable protons available in the wine, express that in gram/liter, and Bob’s your uncle, that’s TA. I have a hard time intuitively understanding how TA relates to the perception of acidity in a particular wine, but winemakers obviously have developed an empirical understanding of the impact of different TA and pH numbers in wine.
Maybe a winemaker who’s learned this in class will have the exact definition of TA, google has let me down so far finding it.