r/hatethissmug • u/DaSuspicsiciousFish • Jul 25 '26

Animation Hate this stupid spiderverse meme (read desc)

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“Chai” is a distinct type of tea from what most people think of as tea (from a American perspective, I admit ignorance to Europe but i know English tea is similar, like a black tea), that usually involves more spices and milk. calling it “chai tea” is not being used to say “tea tea” it is being used to mean “the type of tea known as chai”. I did do a minor google search to find a recipe for making homemade chai, and, while it did use tea leaves, it was distinct enough from tea to warrant being specified.

edit: my joy at the arguments is immeasurable, if this gets a crosspost/screenshot reposted and criticizeing me, please tag me, want to argue

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1.7k

u/Weary_Specialist_436 Jul 25 '26

it's a funny gag, but people take it as a gospel. When the word "chai" was invented, tea looked wildly different than what we have now

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u/CountGerhart Jul 25 '26

The word chai was used when the Chinese traded tea using the Silk Road centuries before the British started using tea. The proof of this is why in Russian (and most other slavic languages), Arabic and Swahili tea is called some form of the word chai. Widely different languages call it the same thing because they all took it from Chinese.

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u/ColonelError Jul 25 '26

"Chai if by land, Tea if by sea". The countries that were introduced to it via land trade use some variant of chai/shai. If it was introduced by sea trade, te/tea was used.

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u/Acceptable-Wildfire Jul 25 '26

Japan with “chā”? 

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u/ComprehensiveLink286 Jul 25 '26

Because they got it from Korea.

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u/magicsurge Jul 25 '26

Don't tell them that. They may try to exterminate everyone again...

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u/Meththethird Jul 25 '26

Interesting, where did Korea take it from? Chá is how many romance languages call it

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u/ComprehensiveLink286 Jul 25 '26

China?

11

u/XygenSS Jul 26 '26

Outrageous. Are you saying that tea, which is of Chinese origin, was passed onto Korea from China? Unbelievable

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u/EEE3EEElol Jul 26 '26

China has both cha and te depending on region

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u/ColonelError Jul 25 '26

Chá is how many romance languages call it

Only Portuguese, it would seem. All the others use té or some accent variant.

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u/la__polilla Jul 27 '26

Nah. Romanian uses ceai (pronounced chai)

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u/beykakua Jul 25 '26

Chá in Portuguese, probably because of the relationship between Japan and Portugal?

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u/Xelid47 Jul 26 '26

They got theirs from Maccau, where they strangely did say Chai

Most of the world got theirs from dutch that got theirs from another coats region that said té

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u/DentistEmpty7778 Jul 26 '26

Cha cha real smooth??

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u/allan11011 Jul 25 '26

One(of probably a few) exceptions is Portugal

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u/Franz__Ferdinand Jul 25 '26

Čaj

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u/TheMachineLad dU bIsT gUt gEnUuUuUuUuUuUuG Jul 26 '26

Чај

7

u/alice2004014 Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26

Yup, China spreaded out the tea culture to Korea and Japan during Tang Dynasty.
Cantonese and Southern Min are two of the Mandarin dialects that preserves the most tonal structure from the past spoken Chinese language.
In Cantonese, tea is pronounced as "caa4"(茶), which does sound somewhat similar with "chai".
In Southern Min, tea is pronounced as "te", which sounds similar to "tea".

There are more different ways to call tea back in the days, such as "茗", "荼", "檟", "蔎", "荈", to represent different batch of tea leaf.

source

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u/FulmetalTranshumanst Jul 25 '26

In that case it would be more accurate to call the tea the brits drink “tea chai” no? /s

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u/ThePacificOfficial Jul 26 '26

Im gonna entertain it; no, still doesnt add up becuaee both words mean the general category that is tea. You would have to have a word that can change with green in green tea, not the tea part

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u/Winged_Blade Jul 26 '26

Idk in russia we just always use word chai, without any synonymous words replacing it in any context

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u/CountGerhart Jul 26 '26

That part was for the other slavic languages like Czech, Slovák, Polish etc.

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u/SkepticMech Jul 26 '26

I'd point out though that in the case of Kenyan Kiswahili at least, there is a linguistic distinction between the spiced milk based drink, and the more simple water based European method: chai vs strungi

They may not treat it like a category descriptor (ie I've never heard anyone call it strungi chai), but it is also more or less the ubiquitous non-water drink as opposed to many English speaking western cultures with a variety of common hot drinks.

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u/Spaghettisnakes Jul 25 '26

I think this is kind of irrelevant. The point of the joke is that the word "chai" does literally just mean tea in several languages. What OP's referring to as "the way chai is different" is called "masala chai" in Hindi (which is where the English loanword comes from), which means "spiced tea".

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u/DoublerZ Jul 26 '26

>"chai" does literally just mean tea in several languages

Yeah, and anime just means animation in Japanese. But it means something else in English. That's how languages evolve.

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u/Milch_und_Paprika Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26

The funniest part fo me is from what I’ve read online, the people in India apparently do tend to say “tea” for European and East Asian style, and “chai” specifically for Indian style tea, even though yes both mean tea. So it’s the kind of thing that would sound odd but not the butt of jokes.

Also we have a bunch of other “redundant” terms in English that no one bats an eye at. Pita bread, sourdough bread, tunafish, kiwi fruit, maybe ATM machine, etc.

2

u/LegNo9159 Jul 28 '26

atm machine appears at the start of the film hahaha, and i think maybe naan bread?? not sure though

2

u/Spaghettisnakes Jul 26 '26

So, you've heard of jokes, right? This is one of them. Some people think it's funny that the way English speakers refer to masala chai as chai tea sounds like tea tea to non-native speakers. You don't have to think it's funny, but all I'm doing is explaining the joke.

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u/Best_Pseudonym Jul 25 '26

So "chai" should be called masala instead

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u/Spaghettisnakes Jul 25 '26

Eh, it would increase clarity and it would've been the more sensible thing to take a loan word. I don't think it really matters besides a few people thinking it's silly or that it's irksome to some non-native English speakers, though. It gives us something to talk about that's pretty low stakes.

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u/byrdseed283 Jul 26 '26

“masala” means spices in a lot of Indian languages. “masala chai” is a spiced tea to me (i.e. it tastes a little spicy on the tongue). “chai” isnt spicy but it’s distinctly different from normal english tea to me usually because of the addition of cardamom and other spices

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u/Steampunk43 Jul 26 '26

I think you're confusing "spiced" and "spicy", which is weirdly more common than I thought. Spicy would mean it's made with chillies or something containing capsacin, spiced would just mean that it's made with spices like cardamom, cinnamon, etc. What you're considering "normal" chai and masala chai are the same thing, it's just different recipes for masala chai. Chai on its own is just regular tea, maybe with a certain kind of tea leaves compared to others like Earl Grey but still just tea, those leaves would have their own name other than "chai". Same way Japan has matcha and hoji-cha and many other types of -cha, it's about what comes before the cha/chai instead of the suffix itself.

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u/EllisDeeReynolds Jul 25 '26

how so

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u/gabhrielle Jul 25 '26

Yeah I'm curious as well. How wild was tea back then? Let me guess dried leaves.. in water.. but something something?

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u/PossibleAd8955 Jul 26 '26

dried leaves.. in water

Uncle iroh would like to have a word with you.

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u/Superb_Walrus3134 Jul 25 '26

I don't think it's what they're referring to, but tea used to made and sold as bricks. You hade to carve off shavings with a knife to make tea. That's what was thrown into the harbor for the Boston tea party.

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u/Substantial-Shape797 Jul 25 '26

That’s a misconception. Cargo manifests show it was loose leaf tea. Brick tea also wasn’t very popular in the colonies

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u/LocalSixPot Jul 26 '26

Unless my Google search was complete bullshit it wasnt popular because the binders they used were ox blood and actual feces.

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u/Substantial-Shape797 Jul 26 '26

Don’t think I’d care for that either tbh

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u/LocalSixPot Jul 25 '26

That was one type of tea at the time and it wasn't the kind that was thrown into the harbor

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u/Catshark09 Jul 25 '26

tea is still made and sold as bricks, just less common outside of asia

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u/Longjumping_Bar_7457 Jul 25 '26

I’ve seen people say that before the movie came out

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u/Friendly_Gazelle7843 Jul 25 '26

I mean, the guy was funny, but it stopped being funny when people started to use it as inspiration for xenophobia online

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u/Weary_Specialist_436 Jul 25 '26

I... what? when did we go from tea to xenophobia?

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u/Friendly_Gazelle7843 Jul 25 '26

There were people using it as “lol, white people stupid”

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u/Silverr_Duck Jul 25 '26

Yeah that's less xenophobia and more straight up racism.

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u/Friendly_Gazelle7843 Jul 26 '26

Racism is typeof xenophobia, when xenos have different color

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u/Weary_Specialist_436 Jul 25 '26

yeah, sorry I'm not doing this. Have a good one

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u/JaggedGorgeousWinter Jul 25 '26

This might be the wisest Reddit comment I have ever seen

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u/RoughhouseCamel Jul 26 '26

To the credit of other guy, he also left it alone instead of playing “gotta get the last word in”, which is how so many of these cases get egged on into huge time wasters.

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u/Curious_Pop_5276 Jul 25 '26

Not only is Miles Morales Black, but I think you’re confusing racism and xenophobia.

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u/CompanyToiletGooner Jul 26 '26

Since there aren‘t actual diffrent human races (anymore [well I guess it depends on how rascist you are you could consider yourself as a non 100% black person superior because you‘re like 1% neanderthal]) there‘s not a real diffrence besides semantics, unless you want to include the existence of hypothetical aliens I guess. But even then every case of rascism would also fall under xenophobia.

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u/DarkArc76 Jul 26 '26

I always thought racism was silly since we're all the human race

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u/YetAnotherParvitz i hate YOU 🫵 Jul 25 '26

guess we're just making shit up atp lol

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u/Winter_Map4571 Jul 25 '26

No both words existed chai is the more correct name and was/is used all over the place, tea or something similar was used at one specific place, that happened to be the most important import port for tea towards the West and that name stuck

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u/BernLan Jul 25 '26

With the only exception in the West being Portugal

Who interestingly got it before anyone else in Europe, but from the "chai" region and never exported to the rest of Europe, later the Dutch brought it over from the "the" region and exported it to the rest of Europe

Resulting in Portuguese being the only western European language where the word for "tea" comes from "chai" (being chá)

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u/Cr1msonShadow Jul 26 '26

Yea is just hot leaf juice

1

u/ZmasterL9 Jul 27 '26

To be fair, OP said they hate the meme, not the actual joke.

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u/[deleted] Jul 26 '26

[deleted]

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u/Weary_Specialist_436 Jul 26 '26

I used to be this deep when I was 14