Noun

Wikipedia gossip (plural gossips)

1. Someone who likes to talk about someone else’s private or personal business.
2. Idle talk about someone’s private or personal matters, especially someone not present.

Synonyms

• scuttle-butt (2)
• See also Wikisaurus:chatter

Verb

to gossip (third-person singular simple present gossips, present participle gossiping or gossipping, simple past and past participle gossiped or gossipped)

1. To talk about someone else's private or personal business, especially in a way that spreads the information.
2. To talk idly.

Gossip is idle talk or rumour, especially about the personal or private affairs of others. It forms one of the oldest and most common means of sharing (unproven) facts and views, but also has a reputation for the introduction of errors and other variations into the information transmitted. The term also carries implications that the news so transmitted (usually) has a personal or trivial nature, as opposed to normal conversation.

In the last decade, gossip has been researched in terms of its evolutionary psychology origins. This has found gossip is an important means by which people can monitor cooperative reputations and so maintain widespread indirect reciprocity. Indirect reciprocity is defined here as "I help you and somebody else helps me". Gossip has also been identified by Robin Dunbar an evolutionary biologist as aiding social bonding in large groups.

The term is sometimes used to specifically refer to the spreading of dirt and misinformation, as (for example) through excited discussion of scandals. Some newspapers carry "gossip columns" which detail the social and personal lives of celebrities or of élite members of certain communities.

Gossip

Contents

• 1 Sourced
• 2 Unsourced
• 3 Proverbs
• 4 External links

Sourced

• Gossip. It’s just a harmless form of recreation. It’s careless talk that deals in polite fiction. It's nasty speculation that's based on not so polite fact. How do we protect ourselves from the venomous sting of such idle gossip? The best way is just to tell the truth and wait for people to start talking about someone else.
  • Mary Alice Young

• A woman and a mouse, they carry a tale wherever they go.
  • Gelett Burgess, The Maxims of Methuselah (1907)

• He's my friend who speaks well of me behind my back.
  • Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia

• To create an unfavourable impression, it is not necessary that certain things should be true, but that they have been said.
  • William Hazlitt, Characteristics (1823)

• There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
  • Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)

Unsourced

• "I hate to spread rumours, but what else can one do with them?"
  • Amanda Lear

From Wikiquote under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Tue Jun 29 07:29:55 2010