‘Tea party’ steeped in confusion

Reporting from Chicago — 

During a trip to China in 2006, Tony Gebely fell in love with tea, both the drink and the ceremony of enjoying a calm cup.

He launched an online tea business this month, but he is having a little trouble ensuring that chicagoteagarden.com gets noticed.

“When I look at search engine results for ‘Chicago tea,’ I find a whole bunch of Chicago ‘tea party’ movement sites,” Gebely said. “There are a few tea places and then all this political stuff. It’s pretty annoying.”

Purveyors of fine tea and tea enthusiasts in general find themselves steeped in a linguistic shift, their beloved beverage now associated with a conservative political movement routinely praised or pilloried on talk radio and cable news shows.

The tea party movement’s name, a reference to the tax protests that led to the Revolutionary War and an acronym for Taxed Enough Already, really has nothing to do with tea. But that doesn’t seem to matter.

“I certainly can see and have seen some confusion with regard to the name they’ve chosen for their movement,” said Dan Robertson, owner of the Tea House in Naperville, Ill., a major tea distributor. “When I first heard about it, I thought, ‘Oh, maybe I can sell them some tea.’ Then I realized that probably wasn’t going to happen.”

He said he recently sent tea samples to a prospective client in Memphis, Tenn., who is starting a business called the Memphis Tea Party. He searched that on Google and came up with nothing but news of political rallies and links to a Memphis tea party organization.

Gregory Ward, a professor of linguistics at Northwestern University, said the tea party movement could permanently change what we associate with the term “tea party.”

“A social movement can certainly trump the original use of a term,” Ward said. “If the movement has any lasting power, then it will become the primary use. That was the case with the word ‘gay.’ ”

In that case, Ward predicted, traditional tea parties will be renamed.

Steve Stevlic, coordinator of Tea Party Patriots Chicago, sees confusion over “tea party” the event and “tea party” the movement as evidence of the movement’s success.

“I think what we’re doing is resonating,” Stevlic said. “I think it also signifies that it is, in fact, a movement. It’s gone from just having a few thousand people taking to the streets last year to millions of people participating in and supporting tea parties. It’s been just a meteoric rise.”

So fast, in fact, that it managed to catch at least one longtime tea connoisseur off-guard.

Pearl Dexter, editor of Tea: A Magazine, was invited to a tea party meeting last year in Connecticut, where her publication is based.

“When I started to read the information they had there, I thought, ‘Well, this is not going to be for me,’ ” Dexter said. “And it was very clear when they saw the magazine cover with President Obama on it that they had changed their minds about me as well.”

rhuppke@tribune.com