From The Ballroom To TikTok

Before "slay" was a TikTok caption, it was ballroom. Before "mother" meant "icon," it was a title you earned. The ballroom scene — Black and Latino LGBTQ+ communities in New York, built up through the mid-20th century and captured for a wider audience in the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning — didn't just influence today's internet vocabulary. It invented a huge share of it.

Here's where the words actually come from.

• Slay — to do something exceptionally well, especially to look incredible. Ballroom vocabulary for owning a category outright — "slaying" a category meant winning it, decisively.
• Serve — to present something (a look, an attitude) with full confidence. Ballroom judges wanted contestants to "serve" a specific aesthetic — "serving looks."
• Mother — the head of a "house," a chosen-family unit in ballroom culture — a mentor, protector and leader. "Mother is mothering" as internet slang borrows the title directly.
• Reading / shade — "reading" someone is delivering an incisive, witty insult; "throwing shade" is the subtler version. Both are ballroom-coined terms for verbal sparring, documented in Paris Is Burning and by ballroom historians since.
• Tea — gossip, or the truth ("spill the tea"). Widely traced to Black drag and ballroom culture, where "T" stood for "truth."
• "The category is..." — ballroom's own format (categories like "Realness" or "Vogue") lives on in every "the category is" meme and caption today.

The ballroom scene built a language of confidence, competition and chosen family, under real social pressure, in communities that were criminalised and ignored by the mainstream for decades. When the internet borrows the words without the history, it borrows the style and loses the story. We'd rather tell it properly.