A very popular song of many years ago and made popular by Marvin Gaye was called, “I Heard It Through The Grapevine.” One of the lines reads: “People say, believe half of what you see, son, and none of what you hear.” I personally believe that half or more of what we know or think we know, “we heard it through the grapevine.” To me, that means from someone or some place other than the actual knowledge source. I don’t know what percentage of people in the world could be classified as scholars or someone who studies and researches to find information and knowledge about a subject they are curious about, but it wouldn’t be a signifi- cant percentage of the whole. The rest of us get our information from the grapevine. The grapevine would incorporate friends, family, newspapers, radio, T.V. and the Internet. The grapevine is the most quoted source among humankind. The only library visited by the majority is the grapevine library. The Internet can be an accurate source if we access the Wikipedia or some other primary information pool that may be found on the Internet.
I don’t want to make it sound like we are not a well informed society, nor do I want to make it sound like all those sources mentioned are totally unreliable sources, because they are not. But much of what we know, or think we know, is only partially true or, at best, an incomplete report. Yet, we may hear arguments between two people in respect to information that neither of them know accurately but who are expressing their understanding of it correctly based on their particular grapevine source.
I love the story about a father and son who went fishing one day. After an hour out in the boat, the boy started asking questions of his father, “Dad, how does the boat float?” The father thought about it for a moment, then replied, “I don’t rightly know, son.” The boy thought for a few minutes and then asked, “Dad, How do fish breathe underwater?” Once again the father replied, “Don’t rightly know, son.” A little later the boy asked, “Why is the sky blue?” Again the father replied,. “Don’t rightly know, son.” Worried that he was going to annoy his father, he says, “Dad, do you mind my asking you all these questions?” “Of course not, son. If you don’t ask questions…you’ll never learn anything!” That father is the grapevine for that little boy, and his vine was deficient of grapes. However, children are naturally curious and most will ask questions, such as the boy in the story above, and many will get similar answers too. Some may hear: “Quit asking me such stupid questions.” Then, of course, a few will get: “Gee, son, that is a good question, let’s go look it up in the encyclopedia or the Wikipedia.” You and I both know that they will most likely go to the grapevine to get the answer, that is the wife or mother, etc.
We live in a busy world, and our busy life, in today’s world, includes surfing the web or in many cases our playing games or watching videos or listening to music, sports, etc. on iPads. Even books are read on electronic devices, it is a different world than the one in which I grew up. I remember as a young boy reading a popular comic book called Dick Tracy. Dick Tracy was a detective with a police force in some large metropolitan city like Chicago. Not all comic books were comical in nature. This was a very serious storyline with wicked criminal characters like “Flat top,” “Prune face,” etc. The interesting thing about Dick Tracy’s character was that he was, technically, way out in front of his counterparts in detecting. He was even way out in front of the readers. Why? Because Dick Tracy had a radio watch on his wrist that he could use to communicate with his department and with individual squad cars. As a young boy, I was so enamored with his watch that I carried a mockup of it around on my wrist for several days. I would actually communicate with my friends via my watch, even though they were sitting or standing next to me.
Regardless of our era, it is still a wonderful world we live in. Too, regardless of the era, we will probably always get most of our information from/through the grapevine—the local grapevine.
There have always been people in every group/community, and every one knows who they are, that are social grapevines. They are the people that just seem to know the answer to everyone’s questions. True their answers are not usually from an academic source, but they sound good enough to us. But! If we ever have an opportunity to pass that information on, we will do so with a confident tone as if it were gospel truth. We will never admit that “we got it through the grapevine.”