Social Media Broke Slang. Now We All Speak Phone.

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

It was on the social-media platform some call X that I first encountered , an expression that originated in Black drag culture to mean “” or “secret biographical information”—as in, “She said she didn’t get fillers, but her boyfriend spilled the tea.” was common parlance on Twitter by at least the Trump administration. At some point in the past year, however, people started saying a noun phrase meaning “physical hotness.” This usage was apparently derived from a misreading of the : “Her body tea, she’s super thick, she’s super pretty.” Queen Opp elided the verb from a declarative clause, which viewers seem to have misinterpreted, taking “her body [is] tea” to mean “[she has] body tea.” as a noun has since become so popular that it threatens to eclipse the original usage. An expression that once had