The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

Herbaceous Communication

At the time that the Never Never was being named, the British had decided that a warm, sunny country with beautiful beaches was clearly a great spot for a penal colony. If you were caught stealing a loaf of bread in early Victorian Britain you were sent to Australia, where there was less bread but much more sunshine. This system was abolished in 1850 when word got back to Britain that Australia was, in fact, a lovely place to live and therefore didn’t count as a punishment. It was decided that lounging on the beach at Christmas did not produce what judges described as ‘a just measure of pain’.

Rather than join the colony’s work gangs, where they might be forced to do hard labour or, worse, administration, some of the more enterprising of the transportees set off into the Outback, where they obstinately continued to commit crimes. The Australian police would chase after them, hoping to arrest them and deport them somewhere else. However, the population at large tended to prefer the criminal bushrangers to the policemen, and would inform the furtive outlaws about exactly where the long arm of the law was reaching. This irritating and unofficial system of communication became known as the bush telegraph.

The bush telegraph isn’t recorded until 1878, but that’s because the telegraph wasn’t introduced to Australia at all until 1853. In America, the telegraph had been around since 1844 and it took Americans only six years before they had invented their version of bush telegraph.

The grapevine telegraph became famous during the American Civil War, but nobody is sure who invented it or why. The Confederate soldiers seemed to think that they had invented the grapevine and that it was wonderfully Southern and lackadaisical. This view is backed up by a contemporary Yankee source claiming that:

However, the other story goes that it was the slaves of the South, those who picked the grapes, who were the true and original operators of the grapevine telegraph. In this alternative version, the grapevine telegraph was the sister system of the metaphorical Underground Railroad that took slaves from the South to freedom in the North.

Then, in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell patented the tele­phone, and the telegraph – bush, grapevine or otherwise – became old hat.[9] The telephone had a great effect on the English language. For one thing, it made the previously obscure greeting hello wildly popular. Before the telephone, people had wished each other good mornings, days and nights; but as the person on the other end of the line might not deserve a good day, people needed an alternative. Alexander Bell himself insisted on beginning a phone call with the bluff nautical term ahoy, but it didn’t catch on and so hello rose to become the standard English greeting.

The other effect that the telephone had was that it made telegraph sound rather old-fashioned. So unofficial communication became known simply as the grapevine, which is why, in 1968, Marvin Gaye sang that he had heard dispiriting news of his beloved’s plans through the grapevine.