Now, the VOA Special English program, Words and Their Stories.
Some of the most exciting information comes by way of grapevine. That’s so because reports received through the grapevine are suppose to be secret. The information is all hush, hush. It is whispered into your ear with your understanding that you will not pass it on to others, You feel honoured and excited,you are one of the special few to get this information. You can not wait,you must quickly find other ears to pour the information into. And so the information, secret as it is, begins to spread. Nobody knows how far. The expression by the grapevine is more than 100 years old.
The American inventor, Samuel.F. Morse, is largely responsible for the birth of the expression.Among others he experimented with the idea of telegraphy,sending a message over a wire by electricity.When Morse finally completed his telegraph instrument,he went before Congress to show that it worked.He sent a message over a wire from Washington to Baltimore,the message was : What hath God wrought. This was on May. 24th. 1844.
Quickly companies began to build telegraph lines from one place to another.Men everywhere seemed to be putting up poles with strings of wire for carrying telegraphy messages. The workmanship was poor, and wires were not putted up straight. Some of the results looked strange,people said they looked like a grapevine. A large number of grapevines lines were going all directions as crooked as vines that grapes grow on. So was born the expression by the grapevine.
Some writters believe that the phrase would soon disappeared were not for the American Civil War.
Soon after the war began in 1861, military commanders started to send battlefield reports by telegraph. People began hearing the phrase by the grapevine to describe false as well as the true reports around the battlefield. It was like a game,was it true? Who says so?
Now as in those far-off civil war days,getting information by the grapevine remain something other game.A friend brings a bit of strange news."No"you say "It just cannot be true,who told you"come the answer I got it by the grapevine.You really cannot know how much if any of information that comes to you by the grapevine is true or false.Still in the olds of American saying,the person who keeps pulling the grapevine shakes down at least a few grapes.
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