WWII-era poster featuring a sailor named “Scuttlebutt Sam” pointing to another sailor’s insignia of rank, a pig’s head over three chevrons, and saying, “Don’t let them hang it on you! It Means Food Waster First Class!” The bottom of the poster reads in large letters, “Don’t waste food!”
20 October 2021
Scuttlebutt is slang for gossip and rumor. The word arises in nautical jargon of the days of sail where a scuttlebutt was literally a cask containing drinking water for those on-board ship. A scuttle is a hole, and a butt is a barrel or cask. Therefore, a scuttlebutt is a water cask with a hole punched in it from which water can be drawn.
Naturally, sailors would gather around the scuttlebutt and talk, much as twentieth-century office workers would gather around the watercooler. (That analogy is perhaps a bit dated now, though.) This practice is referred to in Herman Melville’s 1850 novel White-Jacket, which is based on his time aboard the frigate USS United States from 1843–44.
There is no part of a frigate where you will see more going and coming of strangers, and overhear more greetings and gossipings of acquaintances, than in the immediate vicinity of the scuttle-butt, just forward of the main-hatch- way, on the gun-deck.
But as steam replaced sails and pipes replaced wooden casks, the need for literal scuttlebutts on-board ship faded, but the word hung on in reference to the conversations and rumors that had once taken took place there. It is in the US Navy that we see scuttlebutt shift from a jargon term for a physical object to the slang sense of gossip and rumor.
In the transition from cask to rumor, we see the word first used as an adjective. From an account published by Henry Harrison Lewis from sailors aboard a US Navy vessel during the Spanish-American War of 1898:
The rumor committee, otherwise known as the “Scuttle-butt Navigators,” to which every man on board was elected as a life member the moment he promulgated a rumor, was soon actively engaged, and it was definitely settled the Yankee was to become the flagship of the whole fleet, our captain made lord high admiral, and the whole Spanish nation swept off the face of the globe in about thirteen and a half seconds by the chronometer.
And in 1910 we get this from the Our Navy newspaper:
Press stories and scuttle butt rumors put the Buffalo in the society class by stating a fair young demoiselle of the Hawaiian group secreted herself in the intricacies of the transport’s lower decks and rode undisturbed into San Francisco.
And there is this from William Richmond’s 1912 Nine Months on a Cruise. It’s unclear whether “Scuttle Butt News” was an actual publication, or just a nickname for rumor:
At each meal, and when groups gathered together in their part of the ship for a talkfest, speculation was rife as to where we were going and why. Extra editions of the “Scuttle Butt News” were published at frequent intervals, and each number contained the latest dope as to our future movements.
And by 1913 we start to see scuttlebutt used as a noun. Again, from Our Navy:
These desertions are not caused by discontentment on the ship, but as far as can be learned via “scuttle butt,” by lack of consideration for this class of vessel in the Department, and the idea of completing a four-year cruise on this Station, everyone believing that after two years they should be sent to duty in the United States, their home country, as the European navies do.
And this explanation isn’t just scuttlebutt; it’s documented.
Sources:
“The Bulletin Board.” Our Navy, June 1913, 23. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
“Ess Dee Stowaways.” 19. Our Navy, September 1910. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. scuttlebutt, n.
Lewis, Henry Harrison, ed. “A Gunner On ..... Board the ‘Yankee.’” The Commercial Appeal (Memphis, Tennessee), 25 September 1898, 11. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Melville, Herman. White-Jacket or The World in a Man-of-War (1850). Boston: St. Botolph Society, 1923, 265. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. scuttlebutt, n., scuttled, adj., scuttle, v.2.
Richmond, William E. Nine Months on a Cruise and Experiences in Nicaragua. 1912. 6–7. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Image credit: US Office for Emergency Management, War Production Board, 1942–43. US National Archives. Public domain image.