Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Ran into this today, and saw it is not here yet.
his bloody tea shirt and jeans
Know Your Types of Tea Shirt $24.99 $22.99
Check out this listing I just found on Poshmark: A blue tea shirt, very soft, with a white elephant print on the front
And so forth. T-shirts, many say, are so named because they look like a capital T when laid flat. I don’t know what (golf?) tees have to do with anything, but that spelling may just be an orthographic variant. I don’t see any clear relationship between tea and this kind of shirt; in fact I associate tea with somewhat starchy and formal aspects of culture, and T-shirts with the opposite. Nevertheless there are many clearly using the spelling “tea shirt” on purpose, as a pun of some sort, of a piece with the punny sorts of messages often written on such shirts. The second example above is probably such a one.
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Those who use it innocently are probably just spelling it phonetically, but might conceivably have some eggcornish motivation for it. I just can’t see any.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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. . . I associate tea with somewhat starchy and formal aspects of culture, . . .
The opposite would hold true for most Brits, though much depends on social class, pretensions and aspirations. The evening meal for working-class folk, for example, used to be called ‘tea’ but nowadays many have moved to the middle-class ‘dinner’. Many of the middle-class, perhaps for that very reason, have abandoned ‘dinner’ in favour of ‘supper’, which is now pronounced as sapper, a treatment inflicted on most words containing the letter ‘u’. Hmm, a touch of your IPA might prove useful here I confess.
Tea shirts for many Brits, then, could be read as appropriately informal. ‘Tee’ makes no sense, and ‘T’ itself is not much better. And it’s not even a shirt! Shirts have buttons! It’s a vest with the beginnings of some rudimentary sleeve! And now I recall that what you call vest I would call a waistcoat. Pronounced ‘weskit”. We might as well give up.
(Well known here, but not in the US seemingly, are ‘tea lights’, small candles in a metal container. They were originally used to warm teapots and continue to keep food warm in various devices as well as for decorative use. Do you have another word for such things?)
Last edited by Peter Forster (2022-03-15 08:57:12)
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Fascinating differences, and changes since the time of the books I associate with British culture. (I have actually been there for a couple of short periods, but most of my exposure has been through reading.) Supper is lower brow than dinner , for me, and feels more American.
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Re “tea lights”, it sounds like something I’ve heard called by a number of names: canned heat, Sterno burners, chafing dish burners, and I’m not sure what all else. (Seems like years since I’ve seen one, much less talked about them.)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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I live in the US and I’ve always called them tea lights, although I’ve rarely seen them under a teapot. Most often I’ve seen them as chafing dish warmers, more recently under potpourris. Canned heat and Sterno burners are like tea lights on steroids. I went check with my supply from the Dollar Tree (they’re not uncommon), and they are labelled tealights- one word, like teapot. I have some battery operated ones, also from Dollar Tree, which are handy inside Hallowe’en decorations.
There are also A-shirts (you have to flip the image and picture the shirt laid flat bottom side up). They’re more commonly called tank tops, otherwise some people might have taken their association with the biker crowd and thought they were aaaaay-shirts.
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