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Idiom: Not your cup of tea
It’s hard for me to believe that I have not written about the idiom ‘not your cup of tea‘ until today in five years of writing these posts.
The expression comes from our good friends on the other side of the world, the British.
When the British Empire dominated the world, the seas and world trade, they began to enjoy a nice hot cup of tea.
Gradually the expression ‘my cup of tea‘ entered the language and was used to refer to something one enjoyed.
If you enjoyed going for a walk in the park, then you could say it was your cup of tea.
These days, the British Empire is long gone, but the expression remains.
You can use it in a positive sense today to say you enjoy something, although I haven’t heard it used so often.
It’s mostly used with ‘not’ as in. “Yeah, Billy Eilish is pretty cool, but her songs are not my cup of tea.”
When something is not your cup of tea, it’s not your style, or you don’t really like it.
Before you get all upset and begin yelling, ‘WHAT? You don’t like Billy Eilish?` at your phone, I’m a forty-seven-year-old-Generation-X-AC/DC-Guns-N-Roses-Aerosmith type of guy.
And damn proud!
Sure, I can listen to Billy Eilish, and I got into the Old Town Road thing for a few months.
It was pretty cool when Brad Pitt made his cameo in the Old Town Road video, but I don’t have it on heavy rotation because that kind of music is just not my cup of tea.
Judge me as you will.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least a 7th-grade education (age 12).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 77.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.