Gossip
The word
gossip may refer to:
* the act of spreading news from person to person, especially
rumors or private information: see
chat* the news spread through the act of gossiping
* a talkative person (from the word's original meaning of "godparent")
* an indie band rock band on the label
Kill Rock Stars, see
The GossipWhile gossip forms one of the oldest and (still) the most common means of spreading and sharing information, it also has a reputation for the introduction of errors and other variations into the information thus transmitted. The term also carries implications that the news so transmitted (usually) has a personal or trivial nature. Compare
conversation.
Some people commonly understood
gossip as meaning the spreading of
rumor and
misinformation, as for example through excited discussion of
scandals. Some newspapers carry "
gossip columns" which retail the social and personal lives of
celebrities or of
élite members of certain
communities.
Gossip has recently come into the
academy as a fruitful avenue of study, particularly in light of its relationship to both overt and implicit
power structures. Compare
discourse.
The word "gossip" originates from
god-sib, the
godparent of one's child or parent of one's godchildren ("god-sibling"; compare the possible cognate of
sib:
sabhā), referring to a relationship of close friendship. The
Oxford English Dictionary traces the usage of
godsib back as far as 1014.
The
Oxford English Dictionary traces the use of
gossip in the meaning of "idle talk; trifling or groundless rumour; tittle-tattle ... [e]asy, unrestrained talk or writing, esp. about persons or social incidents" back as far as 1811. This became a primary meaning of the word, although literary as well as everyday English can continue to use
gossip in the sense of "talkative woman" (apparently a near-synonym with "godparent" in Early Modern English, the first attestation of the extended meaning of "anyone engaging in familiar or idle talk" dating from 1566). The verb
to gossip dates to the early 17th century.
One
popular etymology connects the word with "to sip": the tale tells how politicians would send assistants to bars to sit and listen to general public conversations. The assistants had instructions to sip a beer and listen to opinions; they responded to the command to "go sip", which allegedly turned into "gossip".
 |
This Soviet war poster reads: "Don't chatter! Gossiping borders on treason" (1941). |
Gossip can serve to:
* normalise and re-inforce
moral boundaries in a speech-community
* foster and build a sense of
community with shared interests and
information* entertain and divert participants in gossip-sessions
* retail and develop
anecdotes,
stories and even
legends: see
memetics* build structures of social
accountability* further mutual
social grooming (like many other uses of
language, only more so)
* function as a
mating tool that allows women to mutually identify socially desirable men and social
pariahs to avoid
* reflect unvarnished and spontaneous
public opinion - of interest to
marketeers,
opinion pollers and
secret policemen.
Some see gossip as trivial, hurtful and socially and/or intellectually unproductive. The
Bahá'í Faith, for instance,
refers to gossip as
backbiting, and condemns and prohibits the practice, as a cause of disunity.
In a more sinister interpretation, restrictions on gossip could potentially paralyse the free flow of information and enforce
straight-jacketed
thinking and
censorship in a community. Compare
freedom of speech.
A feminist defition of gossip presents it as "a way of talking between women, intimate in style, personal and domestic in scope and setting, a female cultural event which springs from and perpetuates the restrictions of the female role, but also gives the comfort of validation." (Jones, 1990:243)
Gossip in Judaism
Judaism considers gossip spoken without a construcive purpose (known in Hebrew as Lashon Hara) as a
sin. Speaking negativly about people, even if retailing true facts, counts as sinful, as it demeans the dignity of man " both the speaker and the subject of the gossip.
Gossip, even when it avoids the sexual, bears around it a faint flavor of the erotic. - Patricia Meyer Spacks
*
Gossip magazines*
Libel*
Rumor*
Scandal*
Misinformation*
Busybody*
Word of mouth*
Yenta*
Label* Robert F. Goodman and A. Ben-Zeev, eds.
Good Gossip. Univ. Press of Kansas, 1993.
* Deborah Jones, 1990: 'Gossip: notes on women's oral culture'. In: Cameron, D. (ed.) The Feminist Critique of Language. A Reader. London/New York: Routledge, pp. 242-250. Cited online in Rash, 1996.
* Felicity Rash, 1996:
"Rauhe Männer - Zarte Frauen: Linguistic and Stylistic Aspects of Gender Stereotyping in German Advertising Texts 1949-1959" in
The Web Journal of Modern Language Linguistics, Issue 1, 1996. Retrieved from http://wjmll.ncl.ac.uk/issue01/rashb.rtf on
2006-08-11* Patricia Meyer Spacks.
Gossip. New York: Knopf, 1985.
*
Ronald de Sousa (U Toronto) on Gossip*
"Go Ahead. Gossip May Be Virtuous" New York Times article by Patricia Cohen
2002-08-10 (requires registration)
*
Emrys Westacott (Alfred U) The Ethics of Gossiping*
Perspectives on Gossip The theme of gossip in three literary pieces
