Word: gossipers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Conversely, gossip seems to cherish a democratic, even subversive impulse: it likes to knock down authority a little. That is why royal families make their servants sign oaths not to write (gossip) about what goes on in the private quarters...
...highly vulnerable Oscar Wilde went so far as to say that all history is gossip. Such gossip, unlike history, tends to evaporate. Gossip is certainly an instrument of power; Lyndon Johnson understood the magic leverage to be gained from intimate personal details, artfully dispensed. He made it a point to know the predilections of friends, the predicaments of enemies. He orchestrated whole symphonies of power upon the Moog...
...late 20th century, technology has immeasurably complicated the business of gossip. Television, radio, the people pages of newspapers and magazines have all conspired to create international class gossip. This macrogossip detaches the usual human taletelling from its local roots. The result is sometimes a resonant emptiness, the feeling of futility that might overcome the soul after watching Bob Hope and Brooke Shields host a television special. Macrogossip tends to be exemplary, cautionary, ceremonial and merely entertaining-like public hangings...
...microgossip-the myriad back-nipping, back-fence, kitchen-table, men's-room exchanges all over the world, the low animated buzz of dirt-dishing that emanates from the globe-is the kind of gossip that may perform a kind of social mission. Microgossip keeps tumbling in like the surf, a Pepysian lounge...
Perhaps most of the world's gossip-both macro and micro-is done for the interest and entertainment of it. At certain dinner parties in Georgetown and Beverly Hills and East Hampton (cannibals' picnics, nights of the long knives), the gossip is a combination of dispassionate vivisection and blood sport: reputations are expertly filleted and the small brown pits of egos are spit out decorously into spoons and laid at the edge of the plate...