Come On, Spill The Beans

To “spill the beans” is not a literal invitation for you to throw a tin of baked beans on the floor. That would be stupid. And would cause a large mess. And it would achieve precisely nothing.

No, to “spill the beans” is to divulge secret information that you probably shouldn’t. For example, if you are in work gossiping by the water cooler and you just overheard that Sharon is getting a promotion and an office next door to the manager, who you’ve long suspected of having an affair with, then to tell your colleagues is to “spill the beans”.

When you stop and think about it, it’s a bit of a strange term, isn’t it? I mean, why beans? And why are they being spilled? It doesn’t even come close to explaining what is actually happening, nor is there an obvious link. Well, let’s figure this out.

Beans in Ancient Greece

The story goes that this expression dates way back to Ancient Greece (because it seems everything can be blamed on them doesn’t it).

As the fathers of democracy, when an election was held the Greeks had various systems in place for voting. For some elections a simple show of hands or roll call would suffice, but sometimes secrecy and anonymity for the voter was required, and a common way of doing this was with counters or ‘beans’.

Again, there were several counting systems they used: pebbles, olive leaves, bronze plates, or maybe even actual uncooked fava beans by some accounts. The Greeks understood the importance of a secret ballot and thus invented various quite clever ways to ensure the voter kept their anonymity.

Here’s how it worked (according to this story): the voter was given two ‘beans’, one of which was white and the other black. The white one denoted a ‘yes’, while the black was a ‘no’. The voter would approach an opaque jar to cast their vote, holding both beans in their hands. Possibly with some other device obscuring which bean was being dropped, or simply by using sleight of hand, they then drop one of the beans in to the jar, and walk away. Simple.

Once everyone has voted, the bean counter spills the beans to count the yeses and the noes: the white and black beans. Thus they are literally spilling the beans to discover what had previously been secret — the election result.

Such a nice story, isn’t it? Often the story goes that “spilling the beans” only occurs if someone accidentally (or intentionally) knocks over the jar and spoils the result by showing the beans early. That leans in a little more on the ‘revealing what you shouldn’t’ meaning.

In text, the phrase “spill the beans” doesn’t appear anywhere until the 20th century. This could be for one of two reasons: a) the Greek voting system and use of beans was only discovered and common knowledge a long time after the fact, or b) the Ancient Greek story is complete hogwash.

It’s almost certainly the second one, but we don’t really know for sure. We do know that early democratic elections really did take place with counters of some sort and secret ballots and all the rest of it, but this could be a case of retroactive meaning being attached: what we call folk etymology, which happens a lot in language as it turns out.

Modern beans

Okay, so let’s look at the facts. The first use of the phrase “spill the beans” recorded in print comes from 1902/03 in relation to horse racing, of all places.

This usage, and various examples over the next 10 or so years, suggests a meaning similar to “upset the applecart” or “rock the boat”— i.e. to cause an upset. So what about it’s current meaning?

Well, using the word “spill” to reveal information traces back to the 16th century at the very least. The earliest recorded example is Edward Hellowes’ translation Guevara’s Familiar epistles, 1574, which says the following:

“Although it be a shame to spill it, I will not leave to say that which… his friends have said unto me.”

Here he is using the word “spill” in the same sense, not wanting to “spill” the information his friends have given him. But there is no mention of beans. By 1911 the The Van Wert Daily Bulletin, printed the following:

“Finally Secretary Fisher, of the President’s cabinet, who had just returned from a trip to Alaska, was called by Governor Stubbs to the front, and proceeded, as one writer says, to ‘spill the beans’.”

Notice the quotations? That possibly suggests the expression wasn’t established at the time, and the author didn’t want it to be understood too literally. If so, this could be the earliest use of the phrase with its current meaning.

But why beans of all things?

Well, why anything? There are variants where you are spilling your guts, or spilling your soup.

It seems the long standing use of the word spill to reveal information morphed with the expression “spill the beans”: as many of these things tend to do, the original meaning was confused or lost and another took its place. It could have been anything other than beans, but beans just stuck around long enough for people to get used to, much like ‘the Bee’s Knees’.

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Sources

• https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/spill-the-beans.html
• https://www.historyextra.com/period/ancient-greece/why-we-say-phrase-spill-the-beans/
• https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/28093/origin-of-spill-the-beans