the.com/tea party

means A small, friendly gathering for drinking tea and chatting — or, by pointed extension, any protest movement that dresses up defiance in the language of good manners.

from The phrase is plain English, just 'tea' plus 'party,' from tea-drinking social gatherings that became fashionable as the drink spread through Britain and its colonies from the 1600s–1700s onward. Its political afterlife comes from the Boston Tea Party of 1773, when colonists dumped British tea into the harbor to protest taxation — though contemporaries didn't call it that; the celebratory, almost genteel name 'tea party' was applied retroactively decades later, turning an act of mob destruction into something that sounds like finger sandwiches and good china. That ironic, defiant-but-polite branding is exactly why later protest movements borrowed the name for themselves.