Le téléphone arabe

Literally: The Arab telephone

Example: “Avec le téléphone arabe, la rumeur du mariage a fait le tour du lycée en une heure.” — Through the grapevine, the wedding rumor went around the whole school in an hour.

English equivalent: To hear something through the grapevine

Origin: The written traces begin around 1943 and the phrase is probably older. The telephone half is the joke: information moves down a chain of people so quickly that the two ends look as though they must have been wired together, and there is some admiration in that — no infrastructure required, and it beats the post. The arabe half comes from colonial North Africa, where the French noticed that important news crossed the country by messenger and conversation long before any cable did, and named the phenomenon after the people doing it rather than after the phenomenon. Téléphone de brousse was used the same way of sub-Saharan Africa. Both labels carry a sneer, and the sneer is aimed at the second half of the process: each retelling deforms the message a little, until what arrives bears no useful relation to what was sent. English calls the children's version Chinese whispers and has exactly the same problem with it.