[Ads-l] Tea, and more

[Daphne Preston-Kendal]

On 25 Jun 2024, at 14:15, Geoffrey Nathan <geoffnathan at wayne.edu> wrote:

> He gives the example of the word 'tea’, meaning something like ‘details’, particularly ‘juicy details’. Normally I would have found this mildly interesting but here comes some actual ‘tea’.

GDoS doesn’t seem to have this — neither as ‘tea’, nor as ‘T’, which I’ve sometimes seen it as. In fact, I think the first time I saw it written it was ‘T’, which led me to assume that it was an abbreviation of ‘truth’. But this may be my personal folk etymology, probably too much influenced by my computer science background, where ‘T’ stands for the Boolean true value.

Urban Dictionary has an entry from 2003. Another entry from 2010 seems to confirm my own suspicion that this was originally queer slang (I first encountered it in queer spaces in probably about 2018 or 2019).
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tea

There’s no useful entry there for ‘T’ that I can immediately see, but also I can’t tell if this is just the uselessness of UD’s search engine.

Here are some 2000 uses from the queer community:
https://groups.google.com/g/soc.motss/c/q4LLRl_yNQg/m/ZgQglEBaUFoJ
https://groups.google.com/g/soc.motss/c/aD_Et5rAQDo/m/skvg4-W_LGUJ
a questionable one from 1992:
https://groups.google.com/g/soc.motss/c/MvSGTwb5L5M/m/UoeiG8XhfHIJ

> That unleashed a flood of replies from other colleagues (understand these are all now mid-twenties folks). There was extensive use of the word ‘tea’ in exactly the sense referred to in the article. When this happened (three days ago) I was mystified by the word, but then this morning I read the article and all is now clear.


If these are theatre people, and the hypothesis that it comes from the queer world is correct, I hope you’ll forgive my saying that it’s not exactly a clear-cut case of a word being spread far outside its original community …


Daphne

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