No Tea, No Shade

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Perry from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Hi, Perry. Welcome. What’s up?

How are you doing? What can we help with?

I’m doing great. I’m so excited to be on the show.

The question I have is about the phrase, no tea, no shade. This is a phrase that I know from shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race or from the drag queen community.

And what I understand it to mean is it’s something you say right before you’re going to tell it like it is, but you mean no offense.

And I’ve read it spelled either with the letter T, like a capital T, or as drinking tea, like T-E-A. And I’m pretty sure it’s related to other phrases like spill the tea or throwing shade.

But I just wanted to get y’all’s opinion or y’all’s experience and where this phrase comes from, the origins and when and where, that sort of thing. No tea, no shade, right?

Yeah.

No tea, no shade. And so if I were going to say something in the context of the show, they didn’t pull off the dress that they were wearing, I’d be like, no tea, no shade. But I’ve got to tell you, the gown is all wrong for you, right?

Right, exactly.

Okay. It’s definitely popularized by RuPaul’s Drag Race. And as a matter of fact, they have a really decent entry on it on RuPaul’s website.

They have a whole lexicon of all the drag terms and all this. So some of this stuff going back decades, well before even RuPaul was born. Really interesting stuff.

And they do have a definition for this. It pretty much conforms to what you’re saying. The spelling is variable, but what’s interesting is, although it’s usually spelled T-E-A, it’s actually supposed to be just the letter T or spelled T-E-E because it’s an abbreviation of truth.

And what’s funnier still to me about that is that originally when it was used, you find the very earliest uses online, they’d say all T, no shade. What they meant is I’m going to tell you totally the truth, but I’m not throwing shade at you. I’m not trying to make you feel bad or to diss you.

And somehow along the way, it just switched to no tea, no shade, even though you are actually giving all truth still. On the website, however, they say one thing that’s not quite true. They say it was coined in season five, which would be 2013 by one of the performers. And actually, the term is at least five years older than that.

And I think it may actually predate RuPaul’s show. So that’s pretty interesting to me. So the shade itself, throwing shade, has had something of a vogue in the last, say, eight to nine years, maybe ten years even.

And when I last looked at this, I did an entry for my double-tongued dictionary. I was able to trace it back to the 1920s when to shade somebody meant something very similar, which would be to defeat or to outdo or to best someone.

And then we start to see it transition. It’s very heavily used in the African-American community. And by the 1980s and 1990s, shade and throwing shade starts to show up in the drag scene. And also it pops up in this whole voguing craze.

If you remember Madonna and voguing, all that, she kind of wrote on top of a trend that was already taking place. And then here we are in 2016 with shade still being a thing that you can throw.

But it’s definitely left the drag community and it’s definitely left the African-American community. And do you know how it came to transform into TEA? Because people weren’t sure. They only heard it and didn’t see it.

Yeah, it wasn’t written down. And they did their best guess.

Okay, great. Well, thank you for all that information.

Yeah, sure.

Perry, thanks for calling.

Thank you.

Bye.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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