What 's that got to do with the... ? - Wikipedia What 's that got to do with the... ? This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. ( April 2017 ) `` What 's that got to do with the... ? '' is an expression denoting an irrelevance or non sequitur in the current discussion. A common form, what does that have to do with the price of tea in China ?, is a retort to an irrelevant suggestion. 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 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. 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. Another explanation of the phrase 's origin is that in the 19th century the price for tea in England was the highest when the first ship with the newly harvested tea from the tightly controlled Chinese markets came in. So for the ship owners it was important to be as fast as possible back to England with the load, otherwise the cost of the passage might not be recovered from the sale of the tea. Thus there were real races ( the tea clipper races ) where the sail ships managed to travel the whole distance from China to England in about 80 to 90 days. The difference in prices from the first load to the later ones was so high that the original price which was paid for the tea in China was quite unimportant. So the `` price of tea in China '' was something that really did n't matter for the ship owners. They had to have the tea in England as fast as possible. A related expression in Hebrew can be found in a commentary on the Biblical commandment of the septennial sabbatical year. Leviticus 25 : 1 specifically states that God spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai ; while this was a common location for God to speak to Moses, the text 's explicit reference to it is very rare. Accordingly, Rashi 's commentary begins with the question `` What is the connection between Shmita and Mount Sinai ? '' ( ? מה עניין שמיטה אצל הר סיני ) The question has since taken on a general meaning equivalent to that of the `` price of tea in China '' expression. References Jump up ^ Rees, Nigel ( 2001 ). Oops, Pardon, Mrs Arden ! : An Embarrassment of Domestic Catch Phrases. Robson. pp. 214 -- 5. ISBN 1 - 86105 - 440 - 8. Jump up ^ `` II. The Softening of the Hard Sciences ''. thewellspring.com. Jump up ^ David Seidenberg. `` Shmita : the purpose of Sinai '' ( PDF ). neohasid.org. Retrieved from `` https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=What%27s_that_got_to_do_with_the...%3F&oldid=849456695 '' Categories : English phrases Hidden categories : Articles needing additional references from April 2017 All articles needing additional references Articles with specifically marked weasel - worded phrases from January 2013 All articles with unsourced statements Articles with unsourced statements from October 2008 Articles with unsourced statements from September 2016 Talk About Wikipedia Add links This page was last edited on 9 July 2018, at 04 : 29 ( UTC ). About Wikipedia

Question: where does the saying price of tea in china come from
Answer: economists