Spill The Beans…

Todays phrase being captured, is Spill the beans, suggested by Fibrecraft Grannie. I suppose it doesn’t matter whether it’s used for either spilling or not spilling the beans, as the meaning should still be the same.

In complete honesty, I’ve not done any investigation on this definition at all this week! Today is the first time I allowed myself to think on what the saying means and where it came from, so let’s do this!

The first thing that I thought about, when looking at this phrase, was my mothers pot of beans that used to sit on the stove overnight. Now I don’t mean the saying could be referring to cooked or raw, but I just went to that place. The only thing I can think it might mean, is that when you spill beans, those little buggers can go everywhere… just like something you may say.

Now I really don’t have any idea if the saying originated on a farm, but it’s probably a safe bet. I mean beans are a food, right?!

From thinking about beans in a bag, my brain went to the next best thing, candy! A bag of peanut M&M’s to be exact!

One time, when my girls were small, I had been standing in the kitchen of our home, struggling to open a giant bag of M&Ms. The top of the bag would just not budge, no matter how hard I tried to pull the edges apart. My husband, at the time, was standing in the doorway to the kitchen watching me fight with the silly bag. He offered to assist, even maybe grab a pair of scissors, but I refused his help saying, “No worries, I’ve got this!” No sooner had I uttered those words, the bag gave, sending peanut M&Ms throughout the kitchen and all the way into the living room where the kids stood watching. It was a free-for-all!

Needless to say, we were picking up M&Ms from all over the place for a while, and I remember finding a gooey pile under our refrigerator, some months later. So this is where I’m now stuck, as I can’t stop laughing about the candy. I sort of think I’m on the right track with my loose definition, but let’s ask the experts at google…

The first thing on the page, when I asked google, was from Inc.com:

To spill the beans Origin: This is likely drawn from the ancient Greek process of voting, where votes were cast by placing one of two different colored beans in a vase (usually a white bean meant yes, and a black/brown one meant no). If someone literally spilled the beans, the election results would be revealed. Aug 29, 2019

While I can say that I was along the lines of the idea behind spilling beans, it wasn’t until after I looked it up that it actually made sense. I’d completely not thought about the vote thing from Greek times, but once I read it, I was like… DUH!!!