The History of Hearing Through the Grapevine

Hello,

Regular Wordfoolery readers will know that when I’m not hunting down the history of unusual English words, I’m fond of my garden. One of the craziest plants in that garden is the grapevine. I spent time this week pruning it. At this time of year it’s dormant and I can admire the gnarly branches and train them against the garden fence. In a couple of months the apparently dead vine will put out a couple of buds. About a week later the entire thing will be covered in new growth and by mid summer the vine will be trying to invade my neighbours’ gardens, stretching to the sky with questing tendrils, and announcing to the entire country that yes, you can grow grapes outdoors in Ireland.

Watch out, Grace! The Grapevine is lurking behind you.

Sadly the grapes themselves are seeded and rather bitter, but the local blackbirds love them in the autumn and the vine’s sheer exuberance has secured its place in my garden.

The idea of hearing on the grapevine is widespread, whether you grow vines or not, but I only recently happened across a reference to its history. First let’s look at the words themselves. Grapevine (or grape-vine) is compounded and with us from the 1700s in English. Grape in Old English was winberige (wine berry) but from the mid 1200s we grabbed grape from Old French. Its origins beyond that point are somewhat disputed but the theory goes that graper meant to steal, grasp, or pick grapes thanks to various Germanic words about hooks. The idea is that a vine hook was used for grape-picking and that’s where we got the word. Certainly when I went grape-picking in France we used a hook-shaped blade to cut the bunches from the vines.

Vine also arrived to English in the 1200s (along with the wine drinking Normans, no doubt) again from Old French vigne (vine). This one came from Latin vinea (vine, vineyard) and vinum (wine) which arose from the Proto Indo European root word win (wine). The word vine spread to refer to any plant with long trailing and winding stems. The grapevine wasn’t native to England, but yes they do make wine there now, and even in Ireland now, although in small quantities.

Grapevine in English was originally all about the plant itself but in the 1860s it gained another meaning. The grapevine became a secret or unconventional way of spreading information and the term arose thanks to the grapevine telegraph, a secret information source during the American Civil War. It was derided as untrustworthy and a possible source of misinformation by the Union supporters who believed it to be Confederate propaganda.

The wonderful invention of the telegraph in 1844 was already embedded in American life and by 1852 grapevine telegraph had been added to the dictionary there. It described the informal network of news in a small community as being like the curling tendrils of a vine rather than the straight telegraph wires stretching across the country. Those informal grapevine tendrils worked particularly well amongst the rural poor who worked among the actual vines.

The grapevine telegraph carried the news, often quicker than the official news on the telegraph and perhaps most importantly, for free. It was associated particularly with African American and Native American communities.

There are two variations of the term, although grapevine works just fine here in Ireland. In Australia you’ll find the bush telegraph for the informal network that passed information about police activity to convicts on the run in the bush (first recorded in 1878). Meanwhile in the U.K. it was the jungle telegraph for similar communications in the far flung reaches of the British Empire in the 1800s.

Perhaps the real reason we still use grapevine in this sense in English today is thanks to Motown. “Heard it Through the Grapevine” was recorded by Gladys Knight and the Pips in 1967 and by Marvin Gaye in 1968 and we’ve been humming it ever since. The telegraph system may be gone, but we’re still hearing it through the grapevine.

Many thanks to the wonderful Phrase Finder website for some details in today’s blog post. Finding the origins of phrases is a tricky task and they do it brilliantly.

Until next time, happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,

Grace