Scuttlebutt is objectively an excellent word. It’s fun to say, has a playful connotation that lands better than “gossip,” and is a great example of a multisyllabic word that is even more amusing when you switch up the consonants that begin each half. Buttlescutt.
I wanted to understand where this word came from.
I was fortunate to have a teacher in early high school show me Google Ngram, which scans a huge amount of historical text that has been OCRed and is a great tool to understand trends in words.
Here are the Ngram charts for American and British English, respectively.
The spike in usage came solely in American English around World War II, and the overall usage is an order of magnitude greater than in British English. However, we can see it has been in use since the 1800s, so off I went to the OED.
It told me that scuttlebutt was originally a nautical term for the cask of potable or drinkable water on a ship. Looking at examples of usage in Google Books confirms this, where you’ll see the term used in histories and records of naval ships or sailing in general throughout the 1800s. The OED claims the first known usage of the term as a synonym for gossip was around 1940, corresponding with the spike in its use.
It occurred to me—and some brief research agreed with my hunch—that the term evolved as an archaic naval equivalent of talking around the water cooler. Whether it’s an oasis, a cask, or a plastic Culligan container, fresh water is a natural gathering place. And where people gather, they chit-chat.
So I propose we use the term scuttlebutt and fancy ourselves a rugged sailor who just has to tell someone about what they just saw Jeremy doing down in the bilge.