There's something oxymoronic—something faintly deceiving—that has always bothered me about the phrase "herbal tea." As a prodigious consumer of "real" tea, I've never felt quite right blurring its boundaries with such ersatz, uncaffeinated stuff. Until recently, I lacked the vocabulary to set my sensibilities at ease. But now, thanks to the pretensions of a local café, I have finally learned to name my enemies. They are tisanes—a noun that encompasses any kind of herbal infusion not made from tea leaves, and that derives from the Greek ptisane (an ancient barley water), via Latin and French.
Disappointingly, however, the word tea itself is rather less etymologically exclusive than my tastes. In almost every language in the world, it can be traced back to the ancient Chinese word t'u, which was used as early as 550BC to describe a variety of plants—including, but not restricted to, the shrub Camellia sinensis (the tea plant)—that were sometimes infused in hot water. The modern Chinese term, ch'a, began to be used in the 4th century AD, but it still encompassed a bewildering selection of flowers, herbs and fruits. In fact, it was only with the publication, in 780, of the "sage of tea" Lu Yu's The Classic of Tea that the word's meaning was pinned down. A similar process took place with the Arabic word for coffee, qabwa, which originally denoted both wine and other brewed stimulants.
Coffee and tea finally arrived in England (and in English) in the early 1600s. Neither, however, represented Europe's first flush of caffeine—that honour being reserved for chocolate, which landed some 50 years earlier courtesy of the Spanish conquista. It was, José de Acosta noted in 1590, the start of "a crazy thing."
