S/O About The "Tea About The Tenant Next Door" Thread

That’s my dd ( age 18) as well

My 20 yr. old daughter uses it a lot here in NY as a synonym for gossip. Spilling the tea is to share the gossip.

I heard it for the first time in the last 6 months. Mostly on fb

Today is the first time I’ve come across this usage.

I already posted in the other thread that I’d never seen/heard that usage before. But interesting that it’s recent and young. I was thinking maybe it was regional or something.

My kids are in their mid-30s and my DGS is still in grade school. Maybe my in-between nieces and nephew could have explained it to me.

 I was just coming to say that the first time I heard 'tea' was on RuPauls Drag Race. 

Never heard of the phrase/context before. But I don't have any young people at home.

LOL.

I first heard it from my teen, who says in a sort of comical, overdramatic drag queen voice, "Here's...the  motherfucking...tea."

Where I live, "spilling the tea about" someone or "having some new tea on" someone means bitchy gossip with the intent to ridicule, humiliate, spread hateful speculation about, dehumanize, invalidate, or otherwise insult and bash another person. Basically adult bullying passed off as being "sassy" or "snarky" to minimize the behavior.

from Merriam Webster

As we see with many slang words that take off on the Internet, tea didn't originate online. But it does share an origin point with many other common terms being passed around social media.

Like shade before it, tea originated in drag culture, and specifically black drag culture. When it was first popularized in general print, it could be spelled T or tea and it didn't refer to the drink. One of our early print uses of T comes from John Berendt's nonfiction best seller, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. In it, he is interviewing The Lady Chablis, a prominent drag performer in Savannah, about her dating life, and she notes that she avoids certain men because they're prone to violence when they "find out her T":

"Your T?"
"Yeah, my T. My thing, my business, what's goin' on in my life."
— Lady Chablis quoted in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, John Berendt, 1994

Chablis' interviews in Berendt's book gave the world a peek into the vocabulary of black drag culture. T here is short for truth, and her truth is that she's transgender. (It's worth noting that Chablis herself uses the letter T instead of the word tea in her 1997 autobiography, and glosses it as "my Truth.")

It appears that T, also spelled tea, had a double-edged meaning in black drag culture. It could refer to a hidden truth, as Chablis uses it, and it could also refer to someone else's hidden truth—that is, gossip:

Straight life must be so boring. Because everyone conforms. These gay kids carry on. ... They give you dance and great tea [gossip].
— "Nate" quoted in One of the Children: An Ethnography of Identity and Gay Black Men, William G. Hawkeswood, 1991

As drag culture—and particularly black drag culture—gained prominence, so too did this dual meaning use of tea. It's spread far beyond black drag culture at this point. The phrase "spill the tea," used as an encouragement to gossip, has been used in everything from Harlequin romance novels to "RuPaul's Drag Race"; "no tea, no shade" has been featured in explainers on black gay slang; comedian Larry Wilmore used "weak tea" regularly on his 2015-16 Comedy Central show in response to people who weren't telling the absolute truth.

And, of course, tea has shown up on social media in a plethora of reaction memes, GIFs, hashtags, BuzzFeed listicles, and even a meta take on the 2015 show "Scream Queens". (Whether that last one is a positive or a negative is up to the individual reader.) For now, we're letting it steep.

Words We're Watching talks about words we are increasingly seeing in use but that have not yet met our criteria for entry.

Not as "spilling the tea", but "the tea is HOT today" or "That's the tea"

Nope, only “spill the beans”.

Same.

ive been familiar with the term for at least a year, maybe two. Got it from pop culture, as well as my cousin, who is 21.