Whisper Down the Lane

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Caitlin from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Hello, Caitlin, welcome.

Hi, Caitlin.

Hi, thank you.

What can we help you with?

Well, there’s this game that I had always grown up calling a certain thing, and when I was an undergrad at Temple in Philadelphia, I talked to a few people that were from a different area than I was, and they always called this game something different.

Spin the bottle?

Not exactly.

Okay.

So this game is when, you know, you kind of sit in a line, and the first person thinks of something that they want to whisper to the next person, and, you know, on and on down the line until it gets to the last person, and the last person is the one that says it out loud.

And so I always grew up calling this game Whisper Down the Lane. But some friends that I had at school, this one girl who was from Allentown, a little bit further north than Philadelphia, she called it Whisper Down the Alley. And then some other people I knew that were from the New England area would call it Telephone. And I’ve also heard Broken Telephone.

So I was just wondering, you know, are there any kind of geographical boundaries for that, and are there any other names for this game?

Now, Caitlin, were you playing it in college?

No.

Or you were just talking about it?

Yeah, I think it just got brought up. You know, I don’t know why, but I can’t even remember, but I know we were talking about it, and I had never, you know, I was so surprised because I had never heard these other names for it.

Right.

Right.

Okay.

And the object of the game is to pass a message down the line, and by the end of the line it’s really different from when it started, right? And you’re supposed to whisper it in such a way that other people can’t hear you, only the person that you’re talking to.

Increasing the chances that it’ll be corrupted, right?

Right.

Right.

This is the kind of game that parents pull out when they meant to have a party outside, but it’s raining and they’re desperately looking for something to entertain a house of four-year-olds.

Yeah, exactly.

I just thought that telephone was strange because, you know, on a telephone you wouldn’t really whisper. So I was like, that’s kind of, you know, a little out there. I mean, whisper down the lake, you know, made much more sense to me.

-huh.

Telephone.

Yeah, we called it telephone, too. It was a telephone game. And, you know, we lived in the country for a large part of my childhood. And so when you got news from one family member, you hung up the phone and immediately dialed somebody else. And then they did the same thing. And so before you know it, grandma’s in the hospital became grandma’s on her deathbed. You know, it’s just like a slight twist to the content of the message, not necessarily even the words.

So by the time that people have shortened the story or elongated it, as the case may be, grandma bought her horse a pistol.

Yeah, it is interesting that it goes by different names. I’m not sure that there are any specific regional components, though, unless you’re in Britain.

Yeah, unless you’re in Britain, they tend to call it Chinese whispers there.

Right. I think I actually was looking up, doing a little bit of research online, and I think I read that. But generally, I feel like whatever article I was reading said, they didn’t typically use it in the United States too much.

Well, I don’t know of any regional variation on this term, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we got a lot of calls about it with other names that people might use. Telephone game, Chinese whispers, whisper down the lane, those are the most common as far as I know.

Yeah, yeah. You don’t hear Chinese whispers here because it’s a little politically incorrect.

That’s right, yeah, yeah.

Right, right.

Well, I might recommend to you the book How We Talk by Alan Metcalf. It’s a very accessible look at regional dialects around the country, and you might find some more in there that would…

Yeah, I would love that.

Thanks so much for calling today.

All right, thanks, guys.

All right, best of luck with your studies.

Bye-bye.

Thank you. Bye-bye.

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