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# Weekend Words: Tea
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/weekend-words-tea/
- Published: 2014-06-15T13:30:57.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:33:19.000Z
- Description: This week, the Tea Party reared its ugly head and Eric Cantor is singing the blues.
- Author: Weekend Editors
- Tags: Opinion, Weekend, Weekend Words, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:03 (2014, 2015, part 1)

![tea](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2014/06/tea.jpg)

Mary Cassatt, “Five O’Clock Tea” (1880) (image via Wikimedia)

This week, the Tea Party reared its ugly head and Eric Cantor is singing the blues.

> “Is there no Latin word for Tea? Upon my soul, if I had known that I would have let the vulgar stuff alone.”  
>  
> **—Hilaire Belloc**

> “If this is coffee, please bring me some tea; but if this is tea, please bring me some coffee.”  
>  
> **—Abraham Lincoln**

> “Tea, though ridiculed by those who are naturally coarse in their nervous sensibilities will always be the favorite beverage of the intellectual.”  
>  
> **—Thomas De Quincey**

> “The best quality tea must have creases like the leather boot of Tartar horsemen, curl like the dewlap of a mighty bullock, unfold like a mist rising out of a ravine, gleam like a lake touched by a zephyr, and be wet and soft like a fine earth newly swept by rain.”  
>  
> **—Yu Lu**  

> “When I makes tea I makes tea, as old mother Grogan said. And when I makes water I makes water… Begob, ma’am, says Mrs. Cahill, God send you don’t make them in one pot.”  
>  
> **—James Joyce, *Ulysses***

> “And the sooner the tea’s out of the way, the sooner we can get out the gin.  
>  
> **—Henry Reed, *Private Life of Hilda Tablet***