The History of Tea:
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A post-colonial expression with origins in Black queer communities, tea means "gossip." In Black drag culture, this "tea" seems to have started as T for "my Truth." Lady Chablis writes in Hiding My Candy: The Autobiography of the Grand Empress of Savannah: "I was successfully hiding my candy! Y'know, my T, my Truth" (25, 172); her truth is that she is transgender. Tea can also refer to someone else's hidden truth—that is, "gossip": "[T]hey come by and catch up on the 'tea'" (69), and "They give you dance and great tea [gossip]" (142), a quote from William G. Hawkeswood's One of the Children: Gay Black Men in Harlem. These tea meanings are discussed in Merriam-Webster at Words We're Watching. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the first time that tea (as tay) shows up in English for the hot beverage with a "somewhat bitter and aromatic flavour" is 1655. Only drunk by the upper class, the cuppa helped build an empire. The earliest mention of tea in the OED is as "chaa" in 1598 in Discours of voyages into ye Easte & West Indies, a book printed by "Iohn Wolfe printer to ye Honorable Cittie of London" (NY Public Library). This tea originates in the Chinese character茶 for "chá." I tip my hat respectfully to Lady Chablis (1957-2016). Thanks go to Erinn Wong for sharing these sources: Hawkeswood (1997), Stack Exchange, and the crowd-sourced "Alternatives and Substitutes for Appropriative or Problematic Language" found below at the "Black English" button.
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