What does "gossip" mean?

And how bad (or actually productive and prosocial) is it?

I have a visceral reaction to “gossip”.

Like most visceral reactions, this one comes from salient personal experiences. I got engaged to my high school boyfriend at twenty… and several months later called off that engagement. Leaving was a decision in which I was both completely confident and not at all confident. There was no other choice, really, once I tore our faux-polished exterior and finally accepted the toxic base underneath—but I was throwing my life plan away.

I was barely an adult, and I was collapsing a relationship that had comprised nearly a quarter of my existence, and you bet my small-ish hometown had thoughts.

Not all of those thoughts were kind to me. And I didn’t appreciate people I hadn’t talked to in years digging through the most painful experience of my life in search of conversation fodder for their next evening at the bar.

Years later, after I’d started dating my now-husband and everything ought to have been hunky dory, we visited my parents in my hometown. Talk turned to one of my sister’s acquaintances. She’d gotten married young and divorced not long after—and I saw myself in her. Though I’d never made it through my own twenty-year-old nuptials, I might have. That was almost me. And so despite the fact that we’d never had a proper conversation, I cheered for her from afar in the way you root for an old friend of your own.

This night my sister told us her acquaintance had just gotten engaged. My dad said, so quickly he couldn’t have thought about it, “she’s getting married again? Twice already?”

I withered.

Then I got angry—“as your daughter who was once engaged and is now not, and is very happy about that healthy decision, I hope no one ever sits in their living room and talks about me that way”—and he apologized, and it was fine. My sister’s friend will never know. No harm done.

Well, maybe just a little harm done. Because even all that time later I hated being branded as stupid girl who almost got married too young and hated how people reacted even when they didn’t mean to (it was almost worse when they didn’t mean to) and hated imagining all over again the conversations people had about me in the spring of 2018.

You can argue that I was too sensitive about this whole thing. And I’ll agree with you in part—I have always been soft; I know I can overreact; perhaps a bigger person truly wouldn’t care that old classmates were talking about her relationship status behind her back. Perhaps I should have accepted that returning someone’s diamond ring after dating them for five years would effectively make the local news. Hell, maybe I should have felt flattered that my life was interesting enough to warrant any sort of attention!

But this talk affected me. I felt like I wasn’t just losing the most important person in my life but also any comfort I’d previously felt in my hometown. Who knew? Who cared? Who would ask me about what they’d heard instead of speculating about my character? Who did ask me how I was doing only in search of information? I lost friends. You expect that in any breakup—especially one this difficult—but the stories that circulated about my role in our relationship’s demise were almost exclusively terrible. (See, the bulk of this gossip happened in my hometown, where my ex was living… and where I was not.)¹ I worried about who I’d see in public. Once I ran into a guy from my high school who looked me in the face and said “oh, it’s the bitch and her dog”. This happened two hours from where we’d grown up, on the college campus where, until that moment, I’d been feeling at least mostly safe.

I’ll stop there because dwelling isn’t productive, and because I realize everything that happened to me as a result of people talking about my failed engagement paled in the face of actually, you know, calling off that engagement. That first thing was the worst thing; it was right; life is better now.

But when I think of “gossip”, I still flash back to that feeling of horrible exposure, like my difficult decisions were dissected for an operating room’s full theater. And I do not want to make anyone else feel that way.

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A few days ago I saw an essay defending gossip on Substack. Earlier this year I read Wordslut, in which feminist linguist Amanda Montell explores the origins of gossip and debunks the myth that it’s always frivolous or malicious. Just two weeks ago The New Yorker published an essay called “Is Gossip Good for Us?” centered around former Normal Gossip podcast host Kelsey McKinney’s new book. The more I encounter positive connotations with gossip, the more I realize my own perception—anchored in personal recoil from all those bad memories—might be narrow.²

Because everyone seems to define “gossip” differently.

Even gossip-defendant Patricia Meyer Spacks agrees. “Definitions of gossip often illuminate the definer more than the object of consideration,” reads the first page of her essay “In Praise of Gossip”.

You don’t have to tell me twice. Semantics are messy.³

I found this sentence telling in the aforementioned The New Yorker piece: “McKinney, a champion of gossip as a personal and social good, is out to change its bad reputation; when she encounters gossipers who challenge her thesis, she finds that they are doing it wrong,” writes Alexandra Schwartz. McKinney has her own perception of gossip—and even she can’t settle on one definition. In Context A, “gossip” is good: whisper networks, solidarity, social connection. In Context B, “gossip” is bad: malicious smugness, untold ripple effects.

“[Gossip] is mutable, anarchic, endlessly paradoxical, and that is another challenge for McKinney,” Schwartz continues.

It’s a challenge for me, too, as someone who wants to understand what friends around me mean when they say “omg I love to gossip”—because these are people I like and respect and know are not Bad Humans—but who still cringes away from the term myself. And any musings on the practice would be remiss not to acknowledge, clearly, that one of the biggest reasons so many of us have internalized negativity toward “gossip” is that we mostly associate it with women. Vilifying idle talk about other people has deep roots in seeing women as “lesser” (not to mention religious doctrine).

We can talk about gossip ad nauseum and still not really agree on what it is, what it isn’t, and most importantly when it’s okay. What parts of the act do we want to reclaim and support? What parts deserve their derogatory associations?

According to Oxford Languages, gossip is “casual or unconstrained conversation or reports about other people, typically involving details that are not confirmed as being true”.

I struggle most with the “typically involving details that are not confirmed as being true” part. Often, spreading anything unconfirmed feels a bit gross to me. Is that because I’ve been socialized to think so? Is my “raised in a religious society fundamentally unkind to women” showing? Or is it because I’ve been affected by it personally in the past? Many of us grew up playing the telephone game, teachers and parents and other adults trying to show us how rumors can hurt—but where does harmless gossip end and a damaging rumor begin?

I have further questions. (Maybe if I ask them enough times, over and over, I will absolve myself of any responsibility to think of answers. I shall sit here in this coffee shop, rain pounding the window, simply questioning forever.) Do any of us have the right to a “private” life when we live in communities of other people? What about celebrities who have opted in to their careers progressing under the spotlight? Does that consent apply to their personal exploits too? How are we deducing that they “opted in”, anyway? What about the value of people being tough enough to not care so damn much what others say? (I admire them greatly.) What about practicing kindness to be the sort of people we want to be? What about valuing intrigue more than kindness? (Seems valid, sometimes.) What about enjoying drama because it’s normal to enjoy drama, because gossip has evolutionary roots and ongoing social benefits? What about furthering that drama?

My friends, I have no idea, really. I have more feelings than thoughts. I don’t mind that in general—but here it means the purely emotional intro to this essay is automatically stronger than the how-do-I-logic-this rambles following it.

Once again I whisper-shout, perhaps a little weakly: It’s nuanced.

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For so long when I’ve thought of “gossip”, the term has represented the kind of hurtful comments made about my own hardest life choice. But depending on how we tweak the dictionary definition (or which Reddit thread we listen to, what other articles we read, who we ask in real life) that’s not it at all.

So it’s worth talking about the distinctions between gossip meant to be hurtful—cruel conversations about other people—and gossip that is healthy, benign, even prosocial.

And maybe it would be helpful to use different terms for these different things “gossip” can be. When you poison a cue in dog training—say you tried to attach a verbal signal like “sit” to a behavior but your dog assigned it a completely different action or developed a negative association—you generally just stop using that cue and start using another. It’s not worth the hassle of undoing what’s been done.

Could we do that here?

So much “gossip” is just storytelling. These stories can be harmless and reinforce bonds between the people sharing—a low-stakes, normal interaction between inherently social creatures in a social world. It’s one of the ways Sean and I connect with friends after months apart: We roll up to their houses with tales from the road, inevitably involving strangers we brushed by in cafes or breweries or campgrounds. We try to tell the truth, but it doesn’t really matter if we stick only to confirmed details because the people we’re talking about don’t know us and don’t know our friends and there is no hurt that can come from our recollections (besides maybe us internalizing larger stereotypes, which is a problem I think we can avoid and another discussion entirely).

Then there’s shit talking. Snark for the sake of “this person offended me once and now I need to confirm that they are in fact terrible”. Snark for the sake of ego. Snark for the sake of snark. Manufactured drama because our own lives don’t feel interesting enough—a dangerous area where natural curiosity rubs against main-character-syndrome and we stop seeing other people as full humans in their own right and start using them as props in the tales of our own lives.

I like the definition of gossip that is “serious” coined by Spacks in her 1985 book. “[Serious gossip] takes place in private, at leisure, in a context of trust, usually among no more than two or three people. Its participants use talk about others to reflect about themselves, to express wonder and uncertainty and locate certainties, to enlarge their knowledge of one another.” (Emphasis my own.)

Personally, I want to engage in this kind of “serious gossip” or no gossip at all.⁴ We can argue if it’s really “gossip” if the focus of talking about other people is less those people and more the relationships here, right now, as we share—up for debate, hence this whole essay—but preceding adjectives like “serious” or “thoughtful” at least help me outline the distinction between gossip-that-hurts and gossip-that-connects.

I’m not sure I’ll ever shake my initial flinch when someone mentions “gossip”. But I can at least understand that the word itself doesn’t have to be a villain. It can wear many expressions like all of us—and we can eschew it in favor of more specific descriptions if we want.

1. Sure, no one who truly knew and loved me for me believed it all, but plenty of people distanced themselves. And the hindsight reality that we’d have probably grown apart eventually didn’t make it hurt less then and there.

2. There’s an essay in Lauren Oyler’s No Judgment about gossip as well. Copied and pasted from my notes doc when I read it last summer: “Her essay on gossip was winding—entertaining, certainly, but I’m not quite sure what she was trying to say. That her golden-rule approach is the best solution? That it’s surface level to only tout the positive aspects of gossip—that some of it is cruel, perhaps even pathological—but that we can go about it in ways that aren’t as acutely harmful? What even is gossip?”

3. Try having a productive conversation about basically anything technical (or hell, even casual) on the dog training corner of the internet—where I’ve spent the bulk of my time online for nearly a decade—without defining a few key terms first. Talk of connotations and personal associations is not just theoretical! The right prefaces have saved entire discussions; lack of them has sent me, and hundreds of other social media commenters, into frustrated tailspins.

4. I type that with a straight face even though I realize I myself have gossiped with less-than-noble intentions so many times: At my most insecure I yearned to claw the people around me, especially anyone who I felt had contributed to my personal woes. (This created an awful feedback loop. It was also cliche to the degree I wonder if it’s worth mentioning. Probably we all have stories like this—and there is no perfect world where talking about other people is always serious and thoughtful. But we can dream?)