Thursday, October 8th, 2009 -- by Bacchus
A few months back, some folks decided to invoke The Guiding Spirits of Our Founding Fathers by holding political protests in symbolic invocation of the Boston Tea Party. They showed up carrying signs, had noisy speakers make noisy speeches, waved some tea bags around, and in some cases, threw said tea bags into nearby bodies of water.
So far, so normal. Public life in America. Could have happened in any decade of the last couple of hundred years.
But… it turned out there was a small cultural misunderstanding. There are some divergent strands in U.S. culture these days, and as the culture fragments, communication “cross-strand” becomes difficult due to linguistic drift.
Thus, some of the people with the tea bags began to call themselves “tea baggers”; and they started calling their protest efforts “tea bagging”.
Hilarity ensued, because of the the fact that “tea bag” (as a verb) already had a well-established sexual connotation in popular slang. A fact of which the “new” tea baggers appeared to be blissfully ignorant.
I was reminded of all of this when I saw a certain t-shirt. Wouldn’t this shirt have been the very perfect thing to wear to one of those protests?
