Word: gossipeer
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...Thursday night's two-hour special didn't even technically end. The celebration scene melted seamlessly into Bryant Gumbel, charged with wringing the assembled full cast dry of their last bits of gossip. He led with perhaps the most ridiculous post-award words ever uttered...
...last week, things changed. Two days in a row, I sat down with my morning paper to read on the front page about serious charges leveled against students I know personally. Two days in a row, the Harvard social gossip wheel started spinning long before lunchtime with details of transgressions, details few gossipers were clear on but many were fabricating, details in which the rumormongers seem to take something of a voyeuristic guilty pleasure. It makes my stomach turn...
...news; serious matters such as these are as worthy of reporting as lighter ones. But publicity inevitably places everything in an unsympathetic light. Seeing fellow students suffer highlights that whether an individual actually did something wrong is not always paramount in the eyes of the media (and the subsequent gossip network). The news generally consists solely of events, e.g., being charged with a crime and the events following that charge. And unfortunately, with the exception of the O.J. Simpson case, an accusal is always a larger news event than an acquittal...
...racial theory of grade inflation is said to have been inspired by anecdotes heard at the time about lenient grading of black students. Gossip, doubtless selectively stated and selectively heard, is a dangerous basis for a social theory, as is a single person’s practice or experience. In fact, the racial theory of grade inflation is so spectacularly wrong that it is hard to know how or why it got started...
After that, I made an effort to assimilate. I traded dresses with a 23-year-old before the school's formal dance. I wrote our anatomy group's freshman skit. I kept up with the who's-dating-whom gossip. I even went to a few keg parties. Still, we career switchers didn't quite fit in. We had outgrown our college-age antics. Instead of joining our younger classmates for late-Thursday bar nights, we opted for a sedate viewing of ER before bed. We replaced their mantra, "Highest score rocks," with our own: "Lowest pass wins." We worked...