SPILLING TEA AMERICAN SLANG
It’s the summer of slang.
Today we’re going to go over the phrase
spilling tea.
On the day that I was working on this video,
I searched ‘spilling tea’ online and found
that it was in the headlines.
“Rob Kardashian’s Instagram Is Disabled,
But His Tea Spilling Continues On Twitter”.
Spilling tea means to gossip about someone.
So here, Kardashian was gossiping about his ex-fiance,
which included posting naked pictures of her.
Not good.
There’s a hilarious Buzzfeed article “18 Pictures Everyone Who Loves Spilling Tea Will Understand”
Looking at things like this
will help you understand what slang means
and how Americans use the different terms.
I’ll put a link to this page in the video
description.
I read that this term comes from the idea
of getting together to have tea, where you
might end up talking about your neighbors
and friends, and everyone else you might know.
I also read that the term may come from T,
the capital letter T for truth.
So if you’re “spilling the tea”, you’re telling
the truth about someone.
What is gossip?
It’s exchanging information about someone,
who isn’t present, that may or may not be
true, often personal in nature.
Often something you’re not supposed to be
repeating.
“I heard you were gossiping about me.”
Another phrase we might use for this is talking
behind someone’s back.
“I heard you were talking behind my back.”
Spilling tea.
Spilling has the ING ending, which is unstressed.
It will be faster, lower in pitch.
Spilling. ing– ing– ing– Spilling tea.
Even though the vowel sound in the ING ending
is written phonetically with the IH vowel,
it’s really more like EE, spilling, ing,
ing, ing–
Spill–ll– Dark L, spilling tea.
Tea with a True T, spilling tea– spilling
tea–
I can’t wait to meet up for drinks.
I heard Renee is going to be spilling some good tea.
Another word for gossip is ‘dirt’.
“Did you hear the dirt on Rachel?”
Personal information, probably not meant to
be shared, maybe exaggerated and untrue.
I’m guessing you have interesting ways in
your own language to describe gossiping.
Share them in the comments below.
When is it appropriate to use slang?
I went over that in video 2.
Check out the whole Summer of Slang series here.