What's tea?
If you hear someone asking that question (or the similar "What's the tea?"), they're probably not referring to the steeped, hot beverage that has long been cherished the world over.
Instead — to put it in other slang phrases of days past — they probably mean "what's the haps" or "what's the hot goss" or, for children of the pre-internet era, "what's the 411?"
In other words, what's going on? In this installment of NPR's Word of the Week, we'll explore the meaning of "tea."
The word traces its origins to Black gay culture.
The late William G. Hawkeswood — a gay anthropologist and author — wrote the 1991 book One of the Children: Gay Black Men in Harlem.
In it, he quotes a man named Nate about his experiences being Black and gay.
"'Straight life must be so boring. Because everyone conforms. These gay kids carry on. They give you the wrong colors at the wrong time. They give you dance and great tea [gossip],'" Nate tells Hawkeswood.
In a later footnote explaining the term, Hawkeswood traces the word back to at least the 1970s, writing: "Three southern-born informants explained 'tea' as 'gossip,' such as that exchanged between 'girls' taking tea in the afternoon. They indicated that the expression was black and originally southern."
A word steeped in history
The original "tea" — the oolong or Earl Grey kind here — traces its English roots to the 17th century, where it was spelled and pronounced "tay," according to the Online Etymology Dictionary.
"Tea" evolved from the word "chaa," which was derived, in part, from the Chinese "ch'a."
People are first known to have begun consuming tea in East Asia.
Legend has it that in 2737 B.C.E., Chinese Emperor Shen Nung was seated under a tea tree when some of its leaves blew into a pot of water that his servant was boiling, leading the emperor to try the beverage, according to the Tea Advisory Panel, an industry group.
The rest was history.
Meme treatment
In the millennia since, the term "tea" as a synonym for gossip has exploded in the mainstream and, as language tends to do when it leaves the confines of one community and enters another, expanded into something more.
And like so much of our culture in the internet age, it probably all started with a meme.
"So in 2014-ish, there started to be a lot of memes of Kermit the Frog, and one specific one — looks like it was posted to Tumblr — was a photo of Kermit the Frog sipping a Lipton tea," said Amanda Brennan, an internet culture and meme expert who is known as the Internet Librarian.
The image came from an ad that featured Kermit pulled from the serenity of 123 Sesame Street and thrust into a Times Square packed with a multitude of his fellow Muppet Animal.
"While it didn't say the word 'tea' in the meme, the image kind of got picked up and used again and again as like a reaction image," Brennan said.
The "Kermit sipping tea" meme, also known as "But That's None of My Business," saw the normally pleasant swamp-dwelling optimist become the spokesman for the type of snide societal observations that flourished online in the 2010s.
"I mean, 2014, when we think about it in meme culture, it felt more like the Wild West," Brennan said.
"So a lot of memes were very raw and very real and talking about things in a way that we don't necessarily put directly into memes anymore," she said, giving the example of one version of the Kermit meme: "You have a college degree and still mistake 'there,' 'their' and 'they're,' but that's none of my business."
The queens' English
The meme found its life in Black online communities but quickly spread to all corners of the internet, according to Brennan.
From there, making the verbal leap from a beloved frog sipping Lipton and spreading gossip to the already well-worn subcultural phrase "spilling tea" was an easy jump.
After all, by 2014, RuPaul's Drag Race — a onetime sleepy Logo TV production turned cultural phenomenon — was entering its sixth season, casting linguistic gems like "throwing shade" and "spilling tea" out into the wind for general consumption.
"As more people consumed the show, they started wanting to use drag slang and incorporating that into other pockets of culture," Brennan said.
"People want to sound cool," she continued. "Everyone loves gossip too. Gossip is social currency, and people are always going to have this innate drive to share it. And then when you can also be funny and cool and call it 'tea,' there's something that feels almost sneaky about it."
But perhaps the biggest agent in mainstreaming tea, Brennan said, was the COVID-19 pandemic.
"So many more people started participating in online culture during the COVID pandemic's first year, and that's when streams really started to get crossed," Brennan said, comparing it to the mid-1990s explosion of new internet users in what had previously been an insulated space.
"The dams kind of broke in 2020" and spread the word to a wider audience, Brennan said.
So that's the tea on tea.
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