I found your blog post quite interesting so I’ve added a Trackback to it on my blog . Thanks…

Fair enough; I was wrong on the origin of TP/tea bag. Since taxes are one of their main themes, I mistakenly assumed that was the reference.

“The coinage of the movement is “Tea Party,” echoing the Boston Tea Party.”

Except that the Tea Party is too ignorant to understand that they have representation in Congress (unless from Washington D.C.) to make that ‘echoing’ stupid. TEA stands for ‘Taxed Enough Already’ except tax rates are at historic lows which makes that stupid too.

Watusie, my apologies; you were right.

Yes that’s the usage of “teabagger” . . . which was why so many people were giggling when the TP started up and proudly referred to themselves as “teabaggers” and had such entertaining slogans as “Let’s TeaBag Washington!” or “TeaBag your representative!”

It took the TP a suprisingly long time to figure out why people were laughing. But Watusie is right that many, many TP members started out proudly proclaiming themselves “teabaggers” before they realized the double meaning. That was about when they started saying that “Tea Party” actually meant “Taxed Enough Already Party”, to try and get away from the comical image they had self-imposed.

I think what Watusie means is that the label “teabagger” wasn’t invented by the critics as a label for TP members — they called themselves that and the critics happily went along because of the double meaning.

bonus usage: probably the most prolific use of “teabagging” in contemporary society is among videogamers. In FPS (First Person Shooter) games, alot of them will teabag someone virtually after they are shot, to humiliate their opponent. Most of the people doing this just think its “squatting on someone’s face” rather than the specific “testicles in mouth”.

If the Tea Party activists and their allies are going to take offense at certain terms being applied to them, they should probably avoid self-identifying with those same terms.

Back in the day you thought the whole “teabag the Democrats” thing was quite funny…until it was turned around and applied to you. http://nrd.nationalreview.com/article/?q=Mjk1YmRjNzIxNmUwMTI0ZWYxZWU4OWU2MzFiOWJmNDE=

Tea bagging is a man putting his scrotum in his sex partner’s mouth.

Watusie // Jul 25, 2010 at 12:52 pm

sinz, “teabagger” is a coinage of the “movement” itself – you chose it, you are stuck with it.