Word: gossipeer
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...Gossip has always had a terrible reputation. A sin against charity, they said, quoting St. Paul. The odd, vivid term sometimes used for it was backbiting. The word suggested a sudden, predatory leap from behind-as if gossip's hairy maniacal dybbuk landed on the back of the victim's neck and sank its teeth into the spine, killing with vicious little calumnies: venoms and buzzes...
...Gossip is rarely that wild. From the morning of the first individual folly of the race, gossip has been the normal nattering background noise of civilization: Molly Goldberg at her kitchen window, Voltaire at the water cooler. To say that gossip has been much condemned is like saying that sex has sometimes been held in low esteem. It is true, but it misses some of the fun of the thing...
...Gossip has always been one of the evil pleasures. It is unworthy, nosy, hypocritical and moralistic, a sort of participatory nastiness. But does it play a heroic moral role hitherto unnoticed? Is gossip merely a swamp that breeds mosquitoes and disease? ("Each man walks with his head in a cloud of poisonous flies," wrote Tennyson.) Or does it have higher functions in the ecosystem...
Large claims have often been made for homely old salacious gossip-the sort of assertions, one might think, that sweating pornographers used to make in court about the "redeeming social value" of their work. All storytelling, hence most of literature from Homer onward, rises from gossip's fertile lowlands. Even the deepest primordial myths are essentially gossip: "Zeus and Hera are fighting again?" "Per shirr...
What we hear in Tolstoi or Flaubert or Dickens or Proust, wrote Novelist Mary McCarthy, "is the voice of a neighbor relating the latest gossip." Literature coalesces out of base gossip, from Suetonius to Boswell's Journals to Diana Trilling's new account (Mrs. Harris) of the Scarsdale Diet doctor's murder...