It seems, instead, to be a twentieth-century Australian coinage. Hence one might assume that not for all the tea in China, the idiom denoting a sovereign unwillingness or refusal to do something, dates from then. ![]() At the time, the British East India Company held a monopoly on tea imports and the tea they monopolised came from China. That high tax on tea was a source of friction with American colonists, who unceremoniously dumped 342 chests of the highly prized and overtaxed leaves into Boston harbour in what later generations would call The Boston Tea Party. They come from a Malay word kati, originally denoting a unit of weight, whereas the golfing gofers come from the French cadet, a cadet in the army. Those caddies, incidentally, have nothing linguistically to do with golf caddies. Tea leaves were a precious commodity kept under lock and key in tea caddies, the most elegant of which command high prices at antiques auctions. ![]() Until the late eighteenth century, it was the preserve of the rich and was taxed exorbitantly. Swilling caddies’ worth of tea as the British do en masse is a relatively modern habit. By a happy non-coincidence, that’s the date of the Queen’s real birthday (Many Happy Returns, Your Majesty!) as opposed to her official birthday in June, when the weather is more suitable for celebratory parades.Īpart from Her Majesty, there is nothing more stereotypically British than ‘a nice cup of tea’, but it wasn’t always so.
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