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.