Word: gossipers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Gossip goes in for the negative, not the positive. It is no doubt meanspirited. "If gossip favors, even enjoys, dirt (the failings of character)," wrote the critic John Leonard, "it is because we suspect ourselves, and the suspicion is a shrewd one." Yet, oddly, people do not seem to object to being gossiped about as much as they once did. After all, as macrogossip has instructed, any gossip is a form of attention, a sort of evanescent celebrity. Even gossip works to keep away what Saul Bellow called "the wolf of insignificance." Privacy is not the highest priority...
...that Glen and Carolyn got out of the same cab at work this morning? And Carolyn was wearing the same dress she had on yesterday?" In gossiping about, say, an office adultery, gossipers will weigh and sift and test the morals involved. Gossip is intimate news (perhaps even false news), but it is also a procession of ethical problems. In gossiping, people try to discover their own attitudes toward such behavior-and the reactions of others. It is also a medium of self-disclosure, a way of dramatizing one's own feelings about someone else's behavior...
...much gossip is retailed merely for the enjoyment of the exchange, the simple human interest in the passing pageant of follies, it also has subtler purposes. Gossip-which concerns people, while rumor concerns events-is usually an instrument with which people unconsciously evaluate moral contexts...
...that is so, then gossip (whatever its individual destructiveness, which can be awesome-ask Othello) also serves as a profound daily act of community. In her novel Happy All the Time, Laurie Colwin has a character who prefers to call gossip "emotional speculation." Right. Through the great daily bazaar of bitchiness (men can be just as bitchy as women) passes a dense and bewildering parade of follies. They involve sex and money and alcohol and children and jobs and cruelty and treachery...
mostly variations on the seven deadly sins. Gossip is a safe way of sorting out this amoral brawl. It is a form of improvisational daydreaming. "Both the virtue and vice of gossip," write Sabini and Silver, "is that one doesn't confront accusers, or demand proof...