where does the saying price of tea in china come from
What's that got to do with the...? A common form, what does that have to do with the price of tea in China?, is a retort to an irrelevant suggestion.[1] This facetious usage implies that the topic under discussion might as well be the price of tea in China for all the relevance the speaker's suggestion bears on it. It has been said[by whom?] that this expression has stemmed from economists, who describe everything economic as affecting everything else, trying to find an expression which denotes the farthest logical connection from their current economic focus, in a sort of butterfly effect.[2] In this way, the price of tea in China was used to denote the farthest possibility. It can also be used to denote an irrelevant topic.
Polka dot It is likely that the term originated in popularity of polka dance at the time the pattern became fashionable, just as many other products and fashions of the era also adopted the "polka" name.[1]
Chinese whispers Historians trace Westerners' use of the word Chinese to denote "confusion" and "incomprehensibility" to the earliest contacts between Europeans and Chinese people in the 17th century, and attribute it to Europeans' inability to understand China's culture and worldview.[4] Using the phrase "Chinese whispers" suggested a belief that the Chinese language itself is not understandable.[5] The more fundamental metonymic use of the name of a foreign language to represent a broader class of situations involving foreign languages or difficulty of understanding a language is also captured in older idioms, such as "It's all Greek to me".
Religio The Latin term