Word: gossip
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Public mores may have changed over the past three decades, but the press still finds itself trapped by the rituals that govern its coverage of scabrous gossip. Today the journalistic rules of righteous rumormongering have been liberalized, even though the results in the form of tarnished reputations often remain all too familiar. Leading newspapers and the television networks are less likely to permit the wire services to do their dirty work for them. Instead, the new, more permissive approach allows them to write and broadcast artfully crafted stories about the rumors themselves, thereby spreading calumny while piously decrying...
...gather for what has become a new style women's club. In the aerobic dance classes at the local Jazzercise center, women are talking about who's hot on the silver screen, trading bargain tips and supporting new mothers and divorcees. The workout classes have become a combination gossip fence, networking center, self-help group, junior high locker room and place to affirm grownup community values. "There's no place like it," says JoAnn Mattia, 32, a physical- education teacher who gets to four or five hour-long classes each week. "Everybody talks about what videos to rent and which...
...Derek earns more respect than warmth and affection," O'Brien says. "I've never quite worked around anyone who was as free of gossip. Personalities were never something that fascinated him, as they almost always are in a university...
This premise of Leader of the Band suggests why Fay Weldon, 55, remains an engaging outsider among the generous circle of contemporary feminist writers. Her twelve previous novels feature a number of heroines unsettlingly prone to confirming male stereotypes about the opposite sex. These females gossip, backbite, succumb regularly to the rhythmic fluctuations of their metabolisms. Having achieved some measure of independence or success, they are likely to throw everything over for some handsome rotter or an insincere promise of love and security. Starlady Sandra knows that her new passion will demand the suppression of her lively intelligence: "If only...
Talk about your dish! In 1963 English gossip columnists figured they had died and gone to tabloid heaven. When these peccadilloes hit the front pages, you couldn't tell the players without a Who's Who and a Burke's Peerage. The scandal, a wild party held at the sunset of imperial Britain, brought down Harold Macmillan's Tory government and ushered in the era of Swinging London: the Beatles, miniskirts, free love and pricey drugs...