[Ads-l] Tea, and more

[ADSGarson O'Toole]

Interesting topic Geoffrey, Daphne, and LH.
The website of the University of Kansas' student magazine "Chalk" has
a relevant article:

Website: Chalk
Article: On the origins of "that's the tea"
Author: Adam Lang
Date: April 4, 2019
https://www.kansan.com/chalkmagazine/on-the-origins-of-thats-the-tea/article_002d73cc-56ec-11e9-bb98-1b8f6da4f2d2.html

[Begin excerpt]
According to Merriam-Webster, the phrase originated in drag culture,
but had little to do with the actual drink. One of the first known
uses of the phrase was in a nonfiction novel called “Midnight in the
Garden of Good and Evil” by John Berendt, published in 1994. In the
novel, Bernendt interviews a drag queen who says “My T. My thing, my
business, what’s goin’ on in my life.” The phrase spread from there
and began to take hold in the internet age of the 21st century.
[End excerpt]

Here is a citation for the 1994 book.

Year: 1994 Copyright
Book Title: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story
Author: John Berendt
Chapter 7: The Grand Empress of Savannah
Quote Page 106
Publisher: Random House, New York
Database: Internet Archive

[Begin excerpt]
"Your T?"
"Yeah, my T. My thing, my business, what's goin' on in my life."
"You mean, you've dated guys without telling them about yourself?"
[End excerpt]

On Sun, Jun 30, 2024 at 1:11 PM Daphne Preston-Kendal <dpk at nonceword.org> wrote:
>
> 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
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org