Spill the T vs. Spill the Tea

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Debra Guidry, and I’m from San Antonio, Texas.

Hi, Debra. Welcome.

What can we do for you?

Well, I was just curious. I’m an eighth grade English teacher in San Antonio.

And, you know, it’s a very unique environment because it’s been a part of Mexico.

It’s been part of Texas, the country, part of Texas, the state.

It’s part of the Deep South. It’s part of the Southwest.

It’s kind of a little bit of everything over here.

And there’s a phrase that my eighth graders have been using this year that I’d never heard before,

And it’s spill the tea.

Spill the tea.

Yeah, spill the tea.

Kind of like how when I was younger I would have said spill the beans.

It’s for gossip.

It’s for gossip.

And so I was just curious where this idea came from because I’d never heard it before.

What are the kids like who are using it?

Is it all the kids or a particular group of kids, or do they all share something different from the others?

Well, I work at a school that’s predominantly Latino, and so a very, very strong Mexican influence, Latino influence.

And so that’s what they share in common, but it’s pretty much being used all over the campus.

Okay.

That conforms.

You know, it’s bigger than your school, and it’s bigger than San Antonio.

To talk about the T is pretty widespread now.

And it’s had this rise since the early 1990s when it first kind of appears in print.

And television shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race have done a lot to bring some slang to the forefront.

And this T, T-E-A is how it’s often spelled, is one of those.

And it’s got a cool story.

When people talk about spilling the tea, they’ve kind of gone back to this word and added this image of drinking tea and kind of gossiping over, let’s say, cucumber sandwiches and your pinkies out and the whole thing, right?

Well, yeah, and that’s kind of why I was thinking it was Southern because, you know, we’ve got Sun Tea down here.

We do Sweet Tea.

I mean, they even have a James Avery charm bracelet that is a little mason jar of tea that you can put on a charm bracelet.

However, the thing is, this tea doesn’t stand for tea.

It actually comes from the letter T. It originally had nothing at all to do with the drink, and it stood for truth.

And actually, in the very first use that I know from Prince in 1991, there’s somebody who says anecdotes told by gay black men.

And he says, these gay kids carry on.

They give you a dance and great tea.

And in brackets, it says gossip.

And so you’ll find again and again in the early days, nobody made the joke or the pun or the play on words of tea, meaning the thing you drink.

It was just tea standing for truth.

However, some people don’t know that.

And they only think of it as tea and gossip.

And that’s fine.

But it isn’t where it comes from.

That is so neat.

Thank you so much for that.

One of the most obvious places that people might have first encountered, this was in 1994,

In the book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

It’s used in there as well.

And I don’t know if it appeared in the movie as well, but that book was so popular.

I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the source of it kind of getting its first legs

And really starting to enter the mainstream because it came from gay black culture first.

Interesting. Thank you so much.

Well, Deborah, thank you for your service as an eighth grade English teacher.

Yeah, we appreciate teachers. You’re some of our favorite people.

My mother was one.

Yeah.

Well, you know, you can only work with them if they amuse you.

Well, it goes both ways, Teach, you know.

Yeah.

It’s hard to learn if you’re not amused, right?

That’s right.

All right.

Take care and good luck.

Thanks for your call.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

All righty.

Bye-bye.

I love puzzling out the origins of slang, but so often it’s hard.

It’s nice to get this little bit of arc of history of tea standing for truth, not tea

Standing for the drink that you imbibe.

Right.

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