HARMLESS GOSSIP: Glorious Tool of Social Bonding /. An Equal Opportunities Pursuit

Just like almost everyone else, your MesaZona blogger loves stories - especially when someone adds ''You didn't hear this from me." OK let's leave that there... Gossip has a poor reputation (have you heard?). But I am going to argue in favour of this pastime, first coined by – who else? – Shakespeare.

Yet another victim of the social quicksand of the pandemic, which has dissolved the kind of commonplace interactions we now realise we took for granted, harmless gossip is a glorious tool of bonding. It’s not only me who thinks this. Prof Robin Dunbar, whom I trust implicitly not only because he heads up a fancily named department at Oxford, but because he is a fellow Liverpudlian, is of the same opinion.

I love a good gossip – life’s twists and turns intrigue and titillate

Whether it’s about football transfers, relationship scandals or Westminster feuds, gossip is a glorious tool of social bonding

Hannah Jane Parkinson

the Guardian

Gossip might be better if one is connected, however tangentially, to interesting and eminent people. But gossiping is an equal opportunities pursuit – as twitching curtains in suburban neighbourhoods and sidebar private messages between PTA members can attest.

It isn’t malicious tattling that I enjoy. . .but there is no doubt that the surprising twists and turns of life intrigue and titillate. Historical ones, too . . . "

Hannah Jane Parkinson

Fri 10 Sep 2021 02.00 EDT