Gossip

Gossip is a name commonly given to certain ways of talking about human affairs, whether the talk is retrospective, contemporary, or anticipatory. Gossip exists in private life and public life, in whispers between friends and headlines in magazines. There are gossip columns in newspapers, gossip television programs, and entire magazines devoted to gossip, a form that is referred to as societal gossip. Yet gossip may also occur among schoolmates at recess, among co-workers at a water cooler, or between riders on a bus, all of which is called collegial gossip. In addition, the burgeoning dominance of digital communication bring rise—albeit in a cursory fashion—to virtual gossip. Gossip covers such a broad range of speech that it is impossible to fully mark its territory.

Gossip occurs along a continuum that offers a blend of two things to the group engaged in it: conviviality and compelling content. As an example of one extreme, pure conviviality, a group of closely bonded women knit while talking enthusiastically about the best way to replace missing buttons. At the other extreme, where content is compelling, two men talk about a neighbor's sex life.

The topics of gossip are typically exciting, drawing in listeners and often causing them to enter a highly energized participatory ritual in a state that sociologist Randall Collins calls “entrainment.” In gossip sessions, speech is rapid, interrupted, intense, and generally invigorating. The sense of bond between gossipers can be intense, and this force also drives the practice of gossip.

The rigors of authoritative tale-telling (verifiability) came, for the most part, after the invention of writing. Gossip functions much like entertainment and may be the earliest form of it through enchantment, the artful weaving of the other's imagination through speaking. Medieval troubadours traveled from village to village engaged in a musical gossip mongering, shortly followed by Boccaccio's Decameron (1350) and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1475), both of which mirror the tale- and gossip-telling of the people of their era. Even the famous poem Rape of the Lock (1712) by Alexander Pope is, effectively, gossip, and it would be no stretch to detect a regular gossiping disposition in that poet, his foils, and his contemporaries. Certainly, there are gossip-like characteristics within folktales, legends, and even myths.