On Being a Gossip > IDEAS & IDEALS

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The act of gossiping is not a virtue, if not a grave vice. If you are a gentleman and if you want to be regarded as a one, you are politely asked to shun the opportunity or the temptation of making it. The main business of a gossip is to retail facts, rumors, or information of an intimate, personal, or sensational nature about other persons behind the scenes. In the practice of it, facts usually undergo some exaggeration or distortion, rumors often prove to be groundless, and the information consists mostly of demerits of the persons being talked about, instead of merits. It is done clandestinely behind the persons concerned, and consequently there is some spirit of conspiracy in the business. The pith and marrow of gossiping lies in its intimate secrecy and mutual trust between the exchangers of the gossips.

     Therein lies also the difficulty of the business. The secrecy and the mutual trust are the virtues hardest to keep and maintain of all, and you can not have a good gossip with the man in your office simply because he sits next to your desk and smiles at you whenever you look at him. Gossiping demands more than that. You should be very careful in singling out your partner, to whom you can pass, with all joy and no worry, the sensational information you have gathered recently, especially when the gossip this time is about your boss, about his infamous habit of beating his wife at home when drunk.

     Only an inept gossip begins his business by saying, "This is strictly between you and me." This is the commonest ritualistic oath emphasizing the secrecy and loyalty at the beginning of gossiping, but it is the most ineffectual and useless overture to it. For gossiping to be successful, a silent pact of mutual understanding should have been made in advance without any ceremony, and like the participants in a conspiracy, the seasoned gossips should know and feel that they are in the same boat for the common course and common destination. If the boat should sink, they should be ready to hit the bottom all together.

     Gossiping with a passing acquaintance could be a disaster. What, if the man you have singled out to be confidential with, should turn out to be, at the end of the conversation, a kin of the boss you have just gossiped about? What, if the man has a loose tongue and reveals the secret to the other fellow sitting next to him in the office, and this fellow who happens to be not on good terms with you, having found out the original distributor of the story, in turn, should go to the boss and tell on you? The worst of all would be the case in which the man with whom you have gossiped about the infamous habit of secret wife-beating of your boss with so much moral indignation proves later to be a regular secret wife-beater himself.

     In spite of the difficulties and perils that entail the business of gossiping, not many can really succeed in resisting the strong temptation and the sweet smack of it, the actuality and intimacy of it. If an effective method should have been found, and succeeded in suppressing all the gossips from our daily conversations, the noise of the world would suddenly be reduced to the silence of the grave, our organ of speech would immediately rut for disuse, all our relationships with others would turn into a mere mechanical operation of practicality, and all the friendly conversations would give way to the grave philosophical discourses. Friends would change into acquaintances, and friendshop itself wanes into formality. Friends are friends only when they can have gossips anywhere and anytime with no preliminary soundings, oaths, or the beating about the bush.

     Gossiping is not only indispensable to friendship. It is also good and useful for your moral disciplin when it is done with discretion. When you are engaged in an engrossing gossip, you inevitably have to run the whole gamut of human folly, weakness, and pettiness, greed, cowardice, vanity, ignorance, cruelty, savagery, shrewdness, slyness, etc., and in the course of relishing them, you will be constantly reminded of the undeniable and painful fact that you are not entirely free from all these common vices. If you are a man of normal moral competence, you could not enjoy other person's vices without reminding yourself of yours.

     Gossiping has its own code of conduct, too. You should not get angry or flushed when you come to learn that you yourself are constantly getting gossiped about by others. A good and able gossip is he who always admits the possibility that others are gossiping about him, when he is deeply engaged in the business. Instead of getting angry or flushed red, a veteran gossip maintains his weight and authority by the quality of his gossip -- that is, by being more refined in taste and fairer in the treatment of facts.

     The word "gossip" in the time of Chaucer was "godparent," usually the godmother. The word was spelled "godsibble" -- "god," of course, having the same meaning it has today and "sibbe" meaning kin, or relative. Over the years the original meaning was extended to include not only godparents but any close or intimate friends. Since it is the nature of firindshop to entrust one's closest secrets to one's friends, and since it is the very human nature to pass on such secrets, the semantic evolution of the word is fairly obvious and natural.

     Therefore, it is evident, from the etymology of the word, that the act of gossiping has fundamentally something to do with the human nature, and it is also apparent that any effort to do away with it, nay, to look down upon it, for the reason of its ungentlemanliness, is to do violence to our noble nature. The only thing you should have in mind is the premise that for the gossip to be done, it requires truly good and trustworthy friends, and since truly good and trustworthy friends are very hard to find nowadays, you are wisely advised not to indulge in it too much and too often, until you have them.
          (March 23, 1985)