Our blog is a year old today. It’s been fun taking a deeper dive into some of the stories and history of the birds that have hit the news and writing about things that didn’t really fit elsewhere on our website, such as the inspiration behind Snowdon’s aviary.
And today got us thinking about the name of our blog, “A Little Bird”, and how and why it came to mean what it does.
‘A little bird told me’ is an idiom that people say when they don’t want to reveal the source of some information they have shared. It’s often used comically, when the source is obvious to both parties, but neither is willing to say it out loud. It’s also used when you have stumbled across some information that perhaps you shouldn’t have.
In the age of newspaper gossip columns, WhatsApp, and blind items the phrase seems almost quaint, and in American English at least it’s considered old-fashioned.
Finding the origin of this phrase turned out to be a little trickier than we imagined it might be.
Shakespeare was the obvious first place to look but although he mentions the word ‘bird’ 105 times in his works, which is surprisingly few when you consider that the total word count of all his plays is over 800,000, he never uses the phrase ‘a little bird’ in relation to birds passing on gossip or secrets.
Indeed, the phrase ‘little bird’ is used just twice:
The little birds that tune their morning’s joy
Make her moans mad with their sweet melody:
For mirth doth search the bottom of annoy;
Sad souls are slain in merry company;
Grief best is pleased with grief’s society:
True sorrow then is feelingly sufficed
When with like semblance it is sympathized.
The Rape of Lucrece
King, be thy thoughts imperious, like thy name.
Is the sun dimm’d, that gnats do fly in it?
The eagle suffers little birds to sing,
Titus Andronicus [IV, 4]
The next place we looked was The Bible, another source for the origin of many phrases we use today.
According to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable the idea of a bird passing on things you don’t want people to know is first mentioned in Ecclesiastes 10:20. Here the author cautions people about taking about the wealthy and powerful behind their back in case a bird happens to be flying by and reports back on what it has heard.
Do not revile the king even in your thoughts, or curse the rich in your bedroom, because a bird in the sky may carry your words, and a bird on the wing may report what you say.
Ecclesiastes 10:20
Another potential source is Norse Mythology. Odin, a god kept busy overseeing wisdom, healing, poetry, death, divination, royalty, the gallows, knowledge, war, battle, victory, sorcery, frenzy, and the runic alphabet, kept two ravens Huginn and Muninn. Each morning he would send them out into the world and before breakfast they would return to sit on his shoulders and whisper in his ear all the news they had gathered.
Although, both of these are potential origins, neither of them refers to ‘little birds’ specifically. In fact, ravens are pretty big birds, and play the role of divine messenger in several mythologies, alongside other birds, in particular doves.
Moving on a few centuries, a version of the phrase crops up in John Heywood’s Proverbs:
I dyd lately here [hear]
How flek and his make, vse theyr secrete hauntyng
By one byrd, that in myne eare was late chauntyng.
In the collection, published around 1538, you can also find many other sayings that have stood the test of time including ‘Better one byrde in hande than ten in the wood.’
Later that century, Brian Melbancke, a writer who graduated from St John’s College, Cambridge in 1579, but who isn’t considered important enough to have a full Wikipedia entry wrote Philotimus. The Warre betwixt Nature and Fortune, which contained may old proverbs including and verses including:
I had a little bird, that brought me newes of it.
Many online dictionaries seem to agree that the first time the expression appeared in a form close to the current version is in Peter Simple, a novel by the English author Frederick Marryat published in 1834.
It is an account of life at sea during the Napoleonic wars, probably taken from the author’s own experiences, charting the hero’s life from adolescence to adulthood, as he searches for fame and fortune while sailing with the Royal Navy.
Terence O’Brien, Peter’s mentor, writes him a letter in which he says ‘A little bird has whispered a secret to me’ in relation to two babies being swapped at birth.
However, an earlier version can be found in Modern Chivalry: Containing the Adventures of Captain John Farrago and Teague O’Regan, His servant, a satirical novel by the American author Hugh Henry Brackenridge which first appeared in 1792.
And yet in their tales of the geni, and other compilations, we have abundance of the conversations of the inhabitants of the air; which proves that the people of the east must be a good deal in the habit of hearing birds converse. The story of Mahomet’s pigeons, I take to be a fiction of the monkish writers; but we have in the scripture, if it is not a figure, and a strong way of expressing what is meant, “Curse not the thing; no, not in thy thought, and curse not the rich in thy bed-chambers, for a bird of the air shall carry the voice; and that which hath wings, shall tell the matter.” Hence the language of mothers to their children when they mean to say that they have got the information from a source they do not mean to explain, “a little bird told me of it.”
Brackenridge even quotes the verse from Ecclesiastes, and gives a definitive explanation of what “a little bird told me” means.
The book in which the hero leaves his farm to travel the world with his trusty companion by his side, has a plot line that appears remarkably familiar.
In truth, there probably isn’t a single source for the origin of the phrase. Birds have been used to courier messages for thousands of years. While pigeons and doves with their homing ability are arguably the most famous, in the South Sea Islands, the ability of frigatebirds to home to their nesting colonies and inability to land on water, also enabled inhabitants to send messages between islands.
In ancient times, people would have been a lot more aware of the presence of birdsong all around them. During the first lockdown, with the reduction in noise pollution, many people started actively listening to birdsong rather than simply hearing it.
We can imagine that centuries ago the soundscape would have been similar. And it doesn’t take too much imagination to understand how people at the time could have used the secretive language of birds as a cover-up for obtaining a piece of scurrilous gossip.
