The identity cues

Social Media Broke Slang. Now We All Speak Phone

It was on the social-media platform some call X that I first encountered the slang term tea, an expression that originated in Black drag culture to mean “gossip” or “secret biographical information”—as in, “She said she didn’t get fillers, but her boyfriend spilled the tea.” Tea was common parlance on Twitter by at least the Trump administration. At some point in the past year, however, people started saying body tea, a noun phrase meaning “physical hotness.” This usage was apparently derived from a misreading of the influencer Queen Opp’s remark: “Her body tea, she’s super thick, she’s super pretty.” ….[READ]