(image by Ollyy at Shutterstock)
The Question as posed:
Gossip❧ ❧ ❧ ❧ ❧
Pretty much everyone does it ...
What do you consider gossip to be?
Why do you think it is so common?
Is gossip alway a bad thing, malicious, or can it be positive?
Has something you gossip about ever come back to haunt?
Have you ever regretted a bit of gossip you passed along?
Have you ever been the object of gossip?
Who is the biggest gossip you know and would it be gossip to tell?
of course I have to lay a base, so I queried the google and got a bunch of links to explore:
Gossip Wikipedia
Gossip dictionary.com
idle talk or rumor, especially about the personal or private affairs of others: the endless gossip about Hollywood stars
. Synonyms: chitchat, palaver, hearsay, small talkGossip etymology from Oxford Languages
late Old English godsibb 'a relative'. In Middle English the sense was 'a close friend, a person with whom one gossips', hence 'a person who gossips', later (early 19th century) 'idle talk' (from the verb, which dates from the early 17th century).a person who spreads gossip or idle talk; a gossip or gossipmonger.monger: (1) a person who is involved with something in a petty or contemptible way (usually used in combination): a gossipmonger.
(2.) Chiefly British. a dealer in or trader of a commodity (usually used in combination): cheesemonger.see also Sesquiotica on monger
How gossip became humanity's oldest viral trend Hugo Francisco de Souza
...information dissemination regarding an absent third party can prompt individuals to condition their own behavior in response to others' reputations. When paired with the tendency of individuals to behave cooperatively towards gossipers to better their own reputations, gossiping has and will continue to remain prevalent in human society for the foreseeable future.***** Explaining the evolution of gossip Xinyue Pan et al. PNAS
Gossip, the exchange of personal information about absent third parties, is ubiquitous in human societies. However, the evolution of gossip remains a puzzle. The current article proposes an evolutionary cycle of gossip and uses an agent-based evolutionary game-theoretic model to assess it. We argue that the evolution of gossip is the joint consequence of its reputation dissemination and selfishness deterrence functions. Specifically, the dissemination of information about individuals' reputations leads more individuals to condition their behavior on others' reputations. This induces individuals to behave more cooperatively toward gossipers in order to improve their reputations. As a result, gossiping has an evolutionary advantage that leads to its proliferation.
Psst — Wanna Know Why Gossip Has Evolved in Every Human Society? Dave Gilson at Stanford School of Business
..."Gossip is helpful because it disseminates information about people's reputations, and that can help recipients of this information connect with more cooperative people," Gelfand says. "As more people are thinking about others' reputations, they're getting concerned about their own reputations too, and they don't want to be the subject of future gossip. So that deters them from acting selfishly."The surprising benefits of gossip Scientific American
...So what, if anything, can be good about gossip? Whenever someone confides something to you about someone you both know—whether the information is positive, negative or neutral—it brings the two of you closer, creating a social bond. According to one study, it even increases your liking for the spreader of the information. It helps you learn who to trust and who to avoid. It enforces group norms......gossip creates a sense of connectedness and belonging. On the other hand, if what you're sharing is injurious to the target, you may feel guilty. You may also feel anxious about repercussions, including retaliation. There's the further risk that listeners may form unwelcome impressions about you.
...the gossiper passed on true information when they had no conflict of interest with the target of the gossip. When they had a rivalry or other conflict with the target, however, they were likelier to pass on things that were self-serving or outright false. Like a villain in a melodrama, a gossiper can take down a rival, for instance, by manipulating people's impressions of them. To figure out the gossiper's motives, Cruz advises listeners, "ask yourself: Who gains?" [the old ?cui bono?]
Gossip: Notes on women's oral culture Deborah Jones in Women's Studies International Quarterly, 1980
...Women's gossip is an aspect of female language use, distinguished from more general concepts of women's speech style and of gossip. Gossip is described here in terms of its sociolinguistic features, with an emphasis on its functions which form the basis for the division of gossip into four categories: house-talk, scandal, bitching and chatting.Gossip, my friends, is both a moral mission and a pleasure. It's also something those in power can't control Van Badham in Guardian 2024
...Shakespeare personifies Rumour as a character in Henry IV Part II, "painted full of tongues", bitterly insisting that "rumour is a pipe, blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures"....Malign or benevolent, gossip's just broadcasting in its oldest, verbal form. It doesn't require literacy, priestly interpretation, printing presses, radio towers or a $44bn website, so it's historically the chosen medium of women, who had no access to these other things.
Gossip and the Everyday Production of Politics Niko Besnier 2009
...The term gossip refers to an often degraded, usually gendered, informal, and "private" speech genre that would appear to be a social universal if allowances are made for the many ways it can vary cross-culturally and historically...As Besnier consistently demonstrates, the often contradictory, or at least highly intractable and always more than a little inscrutable, motives of individuals, coupled with the intriguingly complex contingencies of the practical realities that underlie all human interactions, subvert any attempt to reduce the political importance of what we tend to call "gossip" to simplistic functionalist readings or ethnographic "just so" stories. (Robey Callahan review, in American Ethnologist)
...We know that gossip can have a broad range of important functions. It is capable of acting as an instrument of social control, thus preserving social stability, but it can also function to channel hostility and justify violence... It is where individual agents attempt, in relatively private settings, to influence the distribution of influence and power and, of course, public events. (Alan Jones review, in Pacific Affairs)
Gossip and scandal Max Gluckman in Current Anthropology (1963) pdf
❧ ❧ ❧ ❧ ❧ thesaurus Webster.com
25 phrases and idioms to help you gossip in American English from Lingoda
❧ ❧ ❧ ❧ ❧ God Almighty's Gonna Cut You Down
Backbiting Wikipedia
The Toxic Web of Gossipers and Backbiting: Breaking the Cycle Abhishek Chaudhary
Here's how damaging gossip can be — and how to stop Linda Lewis Griffith
scurrilous
late 16th century: from French scurrile or Latin scurrilus (from scurra 'buffoon') + -ous."given to the use of low and indecent language,"
"using such language as only the licence of a buffoon can warrant" [Johnson], 1570s, from scurrile "coarsely joking" (implied in scurrility), from Latin scurrilis "buffoon-like," from scurra "fashionable city idler, man-about-town," later "buffoon." According to Klein's sources, "an Etruscan loan-word."expressing unfair or false criticism that is likely to damage someone's reputation
If something is scurrilous, it's meant to offend
Scurrilous rumors can give you a bad reputation, and scurrilous stories sell tabloid magazines.If you say something scurrilous about someone, your intentions are bad: you mean to damage their reputation or insult them (or quite possibly both). Writing an article for the school newspaper in which you claim that your math teacher has a secret life as a circus clown could be seen as a scurrilous attack, unless she proudly moonlights entertaining kids with her juggling skills.
I tried searching LRB and NYRB for occurrences of 'gossip', with moderate success
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WhisperI get to indulge myself exploring the Anthropology of Gossip: how it works, what it does in sociocultural space, its universality and ineradicability, its analogs and near neighbors, and what mass media and the "social media" technologies have done and are doing... Here's a bunch of links that seem relevant:
Evolution of Gossip Lapham's QuarterlyGroup survival, argues anthropologist Robin Dunbar, necessitates strong social ties and frequent sharing of information among individuals. "In a nutshell," he wrote in 1996, "I am suggesting that language evolved to allow us to gossip."Gossip as Cultural Learning Roy F Baumeister et al 2004 (pdf)
...the authors propose that gossip serves to help people learn about how to live in their cultural society. Gossip anecdotes communicate rules in narrative form, such as by describing how someone else came to grief by violating social norms. Gossip is thus an extension of observational learning, allowing one to learn from the triumphs and misadventures of people beyond one's immediate perceptual sphere.Is gossip a form of social control? at Quora
Ignorant people fear what they don't understand and hate what they fear. At some point you said or did something that made someone think that you think you're better than everyone else...They all think it's their responsibility to kick you down a notch, and they will say just about anything to do it so long as they never have to actually confront you face to face. They are cowards, lairs, mean spirited, and stupid.Gossip as Social Control: Informal Sanctions on Ethical Violations in Scientific Workplaces
...we find that scientists are often reticent or unable to take formal action against many behaviors they perceive as unethical and irresponsible. As a result, they resort to informal gossip to warn colleagues of transgressors. Many express confidence that such pro-social gossip can serve as a means of social control by tarnishing the reputations of transgressors. Yet its effectiveness as a form of social control is limited, particularly when transgressors enjoy higher status than gossipers."You Don't Want to Be One of Those stories" Gossip and Shame as Instruments of Social Control in Small Communities Gréta Bergrún Jóhannesdóttír and Unnur Dís Skaptadóttir in NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 2023
Small, tight-knit communities often have the image of being places that are full of gossip and where everybody knows each other's business. This closeness can be claustrophobic for individuals who might not want to live by the accepted social norms of the community. Gossip and rumours can be used to keep such individuals in their place by enforcing social norms through social control. Shaming is crucial to this form of social control, where certain behaviour is punished and shamed through the spread of gossip. Shaming is gendered and is used more harshly against women than against men, particularly in regard to women's behaviour in public and their sexual activity.When do gossip receivers assess negative gossip as justifiable? A goal framing approach Elena Martinescu in Acta Psychologica 2024
...Negative gossip is seemingly a paradoxical behavior. On the one hand, negative gossip tends to be seen as undesirable and is socially disapproved because it is perceived as disrespectful or harmful for the target (Bergmann, 1993). Negative gossip is particularly problematic because it damages targets' reputation, harming their well-being and social inclusion in groups (e.g., Martinescu et al., 2021; Wu et al., 2018; Xing et al., 2021). As such, negative gossip may violate moral principles such as caring for others and treating them fairly (Haidt, 2012). For this reason, many people think of gossip as a deviant behavior and are reluctant to admitting that they themselves participate in gossip (Brady et al., 2017).Gossip, Exclusion, Competition, and Spite: A Look Below the Glass Ceiling at Female-to-Female Communication Habits in the Workplace Katelyn Elizabeth Brownlee (pdf)
...this research suggests that indirect social aggression is a part of the organizational experience, in particular that gossip is a cultural norm of female subgroups and that the general complacency toward indirect social aggression between women may be connected to the lack of upward progression...Gossip's ephemeral longevity: Power, circulation, and new media NECSUS
...On the one hand, people dismiss gossip as idle and trifling. Yet they also view it as a major threat to individual and societal well-being, necessitating sanction and control. As a bad habit, a paid profession, or a delicious entertainment, gossip serves as an important tool across the centuries to solicit interest in a written or spoken narrative. We want to know who is sleeping with whom, who strayed outside of social norms, what corruption lurks below the surface. Gossip gets leveraged as the 'real' story, but often remains disavowed as a method of legitimate knowledge production.Gossip as an effective and low-cost form of punishment Matthew Feinberg et al. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 2012 (pdf)
...Gossip promotes cooperation in groups in two primary ways: (1) by spreading reputational information that warns group members about a transgressor, leading them to avoid or ostracize the transgressor; and (2) by increasing reputational incentives that deter individuals from behaving antisocially...At its most general, 'gossip' is talk within a social group ...which can be bounded and defined at many levels and scales. each of which is enlivened by communication acts and exchanges. and the anthropologist can look into the contents of those exchanges, and find successes and failure.s and discern pathologies. Until fairly recently (with the advent of "social media") the groups were face-to-face, and local social control was clearly a main driver, "...discouraging behavior perceived as deviating from accepted norms", a really icky quadrant of human social behavior, a corner of the passive-aggressive domain of speech in which dwell innuendo, bad-mouthing, slut-shaming, slander, dissing, tattle... (each a lexeme well worth a closer look).
Think Mean Girls, 2002 AND 2024
The Local Girls Who Inspired the Hollywood Classic "Mean Girls" Sylvie McNamara at Washingtonian
Mean Girls Review: Why Everyone Hates the 2024 Remake Sophie Martin at The Badger
One of the earmarks of gossip is the gossiper's tacit claim to be sharing knowledge/information that is not generally known, because secret, or supposedly privileged information that the gossiper has, and passes along as an act of faux solidarity with the listener— an entre nous and "can you keep as secret?... and "you'll never guess...". The intent may be actively malicious character assassination, or in the realm of tattle
Influencers and tattle
tattle Online Etymology Dictionarytattle Merriam-Webster Thesaurus
Influencer marketing Wikipedia
Influencer/celeb gossip forums at mumsnet.com
TikTok Influencer Gossip at tiktok.com
Tattle Life on Influencers
I contemplate the notion that the #MeToo drama of recent years is a sort of inversion of 'gossip' in that the me-too person is revealing a "secret" about herself, for purposes of invoking social control sanctions on an abuser (though it's much more complicated in real life... think back to the epidemic of recovered memories of the last decade of the 20th century
McDonald's and the Post #MeToo Rules of Sex In the Workplace HBS Working Knowledge
❧ ❧ ❧ ❧ ❧ Mass media infect[s] people with catch phrases and promulgates their ubiquity. In print and radio and cinema and recordings, the transmission was one-way, and then diffused by common use. But then the digital revolution (basically since 1990 or so) made it possible to create and connect groups of the like-minded, and led to the creation of "social media", in which memes could propagate, to give gossip new multi-person real-time platforms for in-group exchange. Put together smart phones and "services" like Instagram and Twitter and Facebook, and you get a Perfect Storm...
Memes are "discrete units of knowledge, gossip, jokes and so on, [and] are to culture what genes are to life..."
Meme Wikipedia
Richard Dawkins instantiated...
A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme...Meme Merriam-Webster
1. an amusing or interesting item (such as a captioned picture or video) or genre of items that is spread widely online especially through social media
2. an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a cultureSlander and Gossip is Evil Pinterest group
Gossip memes truths Pinterest
Gossip meme Tiktok
...and most of these apply to gossipers as well:
