What counts as gossip these days, anyway?

At Interliber I ran into a colleague, a well known Croatian writer. For a number of objective reasons I could not edit his new novel, but I recommended a good acquaintance of mine, an excellent editor. I introduced them, the novel was “polished”, it came out on time, it is excellent, everyone is happy. Now the writer tells me we should go for a beer to celebrate and asks whether it will be just the two of us or if we should invite the editor as well. “Let’s all go together”, I say. “Yes, yes, the three of us”, he says, “so we can gossip a little.”

The myth has long been debunked. The first one, that gossiping is exclusively a female pleasure. Men gossip plenty, and often, with relish, sweetly. One should also dismantle the second one, the idea that only people who have nothing else to talk about gossip and that it is a lower form of communication. It is true that for years I lived by that Eleanor Roosevelt quote that great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, and small minds discuss people, but over time I learned that even the sayings of major figures should be taken with a grain of salt. I still know some people who live by that principle, noble at its core, but instead of seeing them as moral or consistent, I usually just find them boring.

I should say that I distinguish several kinds and levels of gossip. Like all other delights and horrors in this world, they can be divided according to many criteria, vertically and horizontally, into proverbial apples and pears, but I think the most important division is the basic one from which everything else begins. Benevolent and malicious. Benevolent gossip is essentially information. A fact about someone that you pass on to another person. You are basically a benefactor, even a humanist. Because you believe that what you know about your boss must also be passed on to your office colleague. It is good for the colleague, since with this new knowledge they will be able to adjust their behaviour. Let us say you learned from a neighbour who works at a car wash that he has never seen a dirtier car interior than the one in your boss’s car. You have to share that with your colleague. Otherwise he might give the boss a dust cloth for his birthday, since what else do you give a boss for his birthday, and it could be taken as a provocation.

Malicious gossip can be invented and in that case it is pure evil. Truly something fit for prison. And even if it is true, if the intention is to smear someone, humiliate them, mock them or deride them, it is not good. I do not like that kind of gossip and I refuse to take part in it.

Gossip can also be amusing or pointless. The amusing ones are pure delight. The person who tells them can indulge their poetic ambitions and their eternal, unrealised desire to become a writer, adding a cheerful detail each time. As long as it is harmless, let it be. If it is fun. Pointless gossip is pointless. There is no zest in it and it produces no emotional reaction. It only fills time so that the person talking has something to say. Those really are the lowest form of communication.

When gossip really is information, I do not consider it gossip even though it may be perceived as such. A friend of mine had a horrible situation at work. She often told me about the abuse her employers inflicted on her and the other employees. All the devious tricks wrapped in the “family atmosphere” of that small private business, devised so that no one would ever sue them for harassment. And there is no one to sue anyway because the bosses are also the owners. Once, in a larger group, someone reproached her for “badmouthing” her bosses. She grew serious and said that this was not badmouthing, these were facts, plain facts. And that if anyone present thought of getting a job there, they should be ready for what awaited them. I agree with her. Talking about it was not only a release valve for her built up frustration, it also served as a warning about what is and what could be, in that company or anywhere else.

This is roughly the principle I follow myself. I never gossip about things I have not seen with my own eyes or heard with my own ears. If I have, then they are facts. I do not retell things second hand, third hand, fifth or tenth hand, it is not fair. My problem is that I like to observe so I see and hear things some might not want to be seen and heard. Whether this becomes gossip, a short story, a vignette from a novel or fades into the endless ether depends on many factors, including my current inspiration.

Among other things, gossip is social glue. You gossip about those who are your equals or those who are close to you. You gossip about your own group. Through that gossip you connect and strengthen your mutual bonds. That is why this writer friend of mine at the beginning of the text smiled so warmly and his eyes lit up when he said we would gossip a little. We are not interested in gossip and stories about firefighters, amateur table tennis players, footballers and starlets, television presenters or even former ministers who have become inmates overnight. We are interested in our world, people similar to us, people who do what we do, writers, editors, journalists, translators, people who fight battles similar to ours, people who, in some parallel universe, might even be us. And if we were in someone else’s shoes, then we could finally hear the gossip circulating around about us.