The secret of a good secret

An old friend sent me a message: can I tell you a secret? Of course you can, I replied.

As Dolly Parton might once have said, if you’ve got nothing nice to say about anybody then come sit by me. I love a good secret.

The average person is believed to harbour a dozen secrets, five of which they’ve told nobody else.

The unspoken rules of secret keeping-telling

These secret secrets tend to be the shameful, guilty ones, the personal secrets that could do us the most harm.

So, will I keep this secret? Well, apart from possibly telling it to the entire readership of The Citizen, it’s a definite maybe.

Anyway, they didn’t ask me to. They probably assume that because they’ve declared it to be their own secret, it will become my secret too, by default.

The innocent. The fool. Because we all know how it goes with secrets, or should know if we’ve served any length of time on a school playground: tell one person a secret and they’ll likely tell at least one more.

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‘Secrets are social currency’

Secrets are social currency, the more thrilling the more valuable, the more outrageous the better, and the best of all are gossipy and just bursting to escape.

My friend might just as well have asked if they could tell me and someone I know – my best friend /mother/ hairdresser/ Himself – a secret.

Anyway, sometimes a whisper lands like a shout, bomb-like, so you (I!) need to tell someone to help defuse it, even a surprised taxi driver or a stranger on a bus, because as any keeper of a salacious secret can attest, if you don’t release the pressure you might implode.

There’s another frustrating possibility too: being told the selfsame secret later on, when you had already known it and kept it in confidence, as requested.

It’s hardly a surprise then that if you add one more vowel to the word “secret” you get “secrete”, you get secretions, you get juicy stuff figuratively oozing from your pores, or that secret and secrete share the same Latin root word.

It’s right there in the etymology: secrets are secretions, likely to leak if there’s even one pinhole breach.

Today, will I be that pinprick? Hardly, because it turns out my friend can’t keep a secret either.

They’ve already told everyone else they know. Dammit.

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