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.