Why do we say "Heard It On the Grapevine"?

Meaning:

Also "Heard it through the grapevine." The idiom means to hear something through gossip or by word of mouth rather than through official channels.

Background:

It’s impossible to hear the phrase, “I heard it through the grapevine” without the 1966 Motown hit coming to mind. Recorded by The Miracles, Gladys Knight and the Pips, and Marvin Gaye, among others, it’s one of the most well-known songs in the United States. The Marvin Gaye version was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998. But the idiom is actually much older, dating back to the 19th century.

The origin of the phrase is widely thought to have been a reference to telegraph wires. In 1844, Samuel Morse performed the first public demonstration of his telegraph system, sending a message from Washington to Baltimore by means of a long copper wire strung between the two cities. It soon became evident that this form of communication was much faster than sending information back and forth on paper, and telegraph wires began springing up across the country. Some felt the lines resembled those used by vintners to train their grapevines, and so the system began being referred to as the grapevine. Hearing something on the grapevine, therefore, originally meant to have received news via the telegraph.

It didn’t take long, though, for people to realize that some news, like juicy gossip, seemed to spread even faster than Morse code over the wire. The phrase “grapevine telegraph” arose to distinguish word-of-mouth communication from “down-the-wire” messages, with the reference to the winding nature of grapevines paralleling the less-than-straightforward path of rumor. The Phrase Finder states “the allusion was to interactions amongst people who could be expected to be found amongst grapevines, that is, the rural poor.”

The phrase seems to have gained popularity during the American Civil War. Some sources also cite a Confederate disinformation campaign whereby the South’s espionage team used the telegraph system to disseminate fake news. A less popular theory is that the grapevine is question was a New York tavern known as The Old Grapevine. It’s thought that the place was where Union officers – and Confederate spies – congregated (hence a building where plenty of rumors were exchanged). In either case, in these situations, to hear something on the grapevine came to mean picking up untrusted information.

The phrase also came to be associated with information passed among individuals enslaved on plantations. In his book, My Brother Slaves, author Sergia A. Lussana writes:

Slaveholders tightly regulated enslaved people’s access to the outside world; however,… despite their best efforts, owners failed to prevent the operation of an illicit “grapevine telegraph”—a network spreading news and correspondence between enslaved communities maintained by mobile bondpeople…Through this system of communication, enslaved men exchanged subversive ideas as well as daily news.

The grapevine’s use as a metaphor for rumor first appeared in print in 1876, in The Reno Evening Gazette. The article’s author states that the Native Americans in the area knew of Custer’s death a good twelve hours before the news was received over the wire. They go on to compare the spread of this bit of information to the “famous grapevine telegraph” used by individuals who were enslaved during the Civil War era.

Other countries have similar idioms, but most scholars believe the American version is the original. In Australia, the rumor mill is referred to as the bush telegraph, while in the UK it was nicknamed the jungle telegraph, although these versions of the phrase aren’t used much anymore - for obvious reason.

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