In the old days, messages through the telephone line could be sporadic, noisy and unclear, resembling the blurred view through thick yet porous grapevines.
Anyhow, grapevine is anonymous with the rumor mill, the unofficial channel through which information, or rather, gossip is shared. Things heard through or on the grapevine are the water cooler talk of the modern day. Or gossip may happen at the water boiler or coffee maker or tea maker as the case may be.
Yet the proverbial grapevine as a phrase lingers on. A lot of people still use the grapevine idiom. And here are a few examples:
1. Britain is a nation of inveterate book readers. Per capita, we borrow, buy, and possibly steal, more books than any country on earth. Literary festivals and book clubs, an extraordinary contemporary phenomenon, flourish here as nowhere else. Like Shakespeare’s Don Armado and Holofernes we have ‘lived long on the alms-basket of words’; we have eaten folios and drunk ink.
In a few days, the BBC’s Big Read campaign is going to ignite this papery landscape in a firestorm of bookish discussion. In place of the eternal ‘What shall I read next?’, a series of nine programmes will answer that not-so-simple question, ‘What's my favourite novel?’ and broadcast the result of a massive poll into the nation’s ‘best loved’ books.
The BBC should be congratulated on this bold initiative, which is bound to excite controversy. It’s safe to predict that there will be every possible reaction, from eye-rolling disdain to chin-wagging enthusiasm. Lists - we love them and loathe them. Books - we care passionately about our reading. The books on the bedside table and in the coat pocket shape the inner landscape of our secret lives. Put the two together and you have the fissile materials for some literary fireworks.
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