Whether you’ve heard “Heard it Through the Grapevine” or not, you’ve probably heard of hearing through the grapevine, and you’ve probably heard things through the grapevine. But have you ever heard why you’d hear things through a grapevine in the first place?
“The grapevine”, as a metaphor for people passing information individually, one-by-one, dates back to at least the 1850s. The metaphor isn’t based on hearing at all; it has to do with what a grapevine looks like: crooked and twisty. In the 1850s, the technological innovation changing everything was the telegraph. The same way that computers captured imaginations between about the 1960s and 2000, such that it became difficult to think of metaphors that weren’t computer-related, in the 1850s the telegraph winnowed its way into people’s thought and imagination.
The telegraph transmitted information quickly and accurately, over long, straight wires. And in visual metaphors — this one, anyway — straightness counts. There were other ways to communicate, of course, and a leading one was simply telling someone, who would tell the next person, and so on. That method was the opposite of speed and accuracy, and the visual metaphor of the grapevine, compared with linear miles of wire, seemed apt. Thus somebody coined the phrase “grapevine telegraph,” even though “just telling people” had reportedly predated the telegraph by at least a couple of years.
The US Civil War came along in the 1860s, and one of its effects in North America was to spread words and phrases when people met and talked with folks they otherwise wouldn’t have met. In 1862, an army major wrote this in his diary: “We get such ‘news’ in the army by what we call ‘grape vine,’ that is, ‘grape vine telegraph.’ It is not at all reliable.” We know about this diary entry because after the war it was published in the book “Three Years in the Army of the Cumberland.”
The telegraph itself is not much used any more (although it still exists), and so is its influence on thought. But the “grapevine” — minus the “telegraph” part, which no longer resonates with people — is still going strong, both as a word and a process.
