Rachel Liv
Spill the beans and telltale. Can they be used interchangeably?
Oct 27, 2017 5:37 PM
Answers · 4
3
Jeff has a great answer. They are two different things. There is another word, "tattletale", which conveys a similar meaning (I think Elena confused the word with this one)
October 27, 2017
3
In my experience, "telltale" and "spill the beans" are not synonymous. Usually the term "telltale" is used like in the following example: "Frost on the ground is a telltale sign that it's cold outside." It's something that is an indicator of something else. Spilling the beans is to tell someone the whole story of a situation (when maybe some details are meant to be private). Something similar (in spelling) to "telltale" that is more synonymous with "spilling the beans" is "tattletale". That's someone that purposefully goes and tells someone something private (like when a sister goes to her mom to tell her about something her brother did). I hope this helps! (edited to provide quotation marks above)
October 27, 2017
Thanks, but I didn't really confuse anything. We should not forget that there's hardly any word with only one meaning and at some point those 2 could be synonyms if they were the same parts of speech. The fact that "telltale" is used most commonly in another meaning is a totally different story.
October 28, 2017
Taking into account that telltale officially doesn´t have a verb form, not really, otherwise they could well be synonyms.
October 27, 2017
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