Why the Tea Party?

Tonight's reading by Young focused upon the reasons and effects of the term "Tea Party" to describe the destruction of tea in the Boston Harbor.  I thought that the article was interesting in its mention that "the old term [the destruction of the tea] was serious and reverential, the new term faintly comic and irreverent"(155).  The article described that the term "Tea Party" was not used until roughly the 1830s, probably due in part to the informality mentioned above.  But the article went on to question why the Boston Tea Party had dropped virtually out of the nation's gossip, for lack of a better word, and then later resurfaced.  Part of the reason given was George Hewe's recount of the evening to a newspaper.  His first hand telling gave a new picture of the evening and brought the story back into circulation.  Having read his account on the Boston Tea Party Historical webpage, I still question why this retelling could have expounded the use of the term, Tea Party, for his story was largely formal and focused upon the task that the Bostonians had set out to accomplish (even if that mean tossing elderly men into the harbor to prevent them from pocketing tea.)   While Young remains rather uncertain as to the exact origins of the term Tea Party, by the end of his article I had formulated my own opinion.  I would assume that the term started like many popular slang terms: one person, thinking him/herself clever, creates the term.  It is then heard by others who find it equally clever, and so spreads.  The origins of the term "Tea Party" may not be, in fact, as complicated as our author suggests.