The Origins Of Raising Your Pinky When Drinking Tea

Everyone knows what you're supposed to do if you're invited to a fancy tea party — flourish the pinky! You're among high society, after all, so you should behave accordingly while embracing afternoon tea, right? Well, that's not actually the case: Etiquette experts, up to and including Emily Post, are in general agreement that doing so makes you look like a total poser. But where did the supposedly posh practice start, anyway? Etiquette (which is quite different from table manners) changes over the years, but sticking the pinky out must have been worth doing at some point. There are a few different theories as to where pinky raising came from, with the most reasonable involving tiny, ultra-hot tea cups without handles — and the least reasonable (but more interesting) involving syphilis.

Tea is, of course, a Chinese invention, and when it spread to Europe in the 17th century, those elegant handled tea cups didn't yet exist (they were invented in the early 18th century after new innovations in porcelain manufacturing). Instead, everyone drank with Chinese-style cups, which were small, handle-less, and (when filled with tea) very, very hot. Because you didn't need all of your fingers to hold the cup, the wealthy aristocrats who could afford tea drank while holding their pinky out to spare their little finger unnecessary pain, which became the thing to do even once tea cups got handles. We obviously can't know for sure, but the point is that while this may be a dining etiquette rule you may have seen in movies, it doesn't have a place in current real-life social settings.

There are several theories and myths around this habit, but one of the more lurid origins for sticking one's pinky out when drinking tea holds that it originated in the French court around the era of Louis XIV. At the time, Europe was being ravaged by syphilis, a sexually-transmitted disease that infected up to a fifth of Western Europe's adult population, and the upper classes were not spared. The idea was that, if you were flirting with someone and wanted to let them know you had syphilis, you would drink with your pinky stuck out; if they returned the gesture, that meant they also had syphilis, and the two of you could therefore enjoy some private time without fear of infecting someone else.

It's a fun story, but it's probably not the truth. The French aristocracy were a pretty lascivious bunch, but they still had plenty of hang-ups about female sexuality — we've all seen "Dangerous Liaisons", right? Any woman admitting she had syphilis in public, even with a little code, was not going to be invited to many more tea parties. (And not for nothing, this was the 17th century; if you wanted to know who had syphilis, you could just look for whoever had weeping abscesses all over their face.) So, if you really want to raise your pinky after pouring the perfect cup of tea, go ahead — just know that the only message you'll be sending is that you're putting on airs.