Gossip is good for you… so I’m told

The Pope hates gossip. In his Christmas message to his Vatican advisers last year, Francis warned that it is ‘an evil that destroys social life’. It’s not the first time he’s attacked rumour-spreading. He once compared gossips to terrorists because ‘he or she throws a bomb and leaves’.

The Holy Father’s condemnations are of particular concern for me because I was recently accused of being a ‘notorious gossip’. I vehemently reject the charge, of course, but if it were true, at least I’d be following a proud journalistic tradition. In fact, if it were not for gossip, this very magazine might not exist. The original Spectator’s founders, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, filled the 1711 incarnation by hovering around coffee houses, picking up gossip for stories. Coffee houses became so hated by the establishment that Charles II denounced them as ‘places where the disaffected met and spread scandalous reports concerning the conduct of His Majesty and his Ministers’.

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Rumour has it that the first example of gossip dates back to 1500 bc. According to the journalist Roger Wilkes, who wrote a history of scandal, cuneiform tablets describe a Mesopotamian mayor having an affair with a married woman. While the details remain unclear – Mesopotamian languages are hard to interpret – this anecdote suggests that humans have always been fascinated by the personal lives of others, particularly when it involves betrayal or impropriety. Gossip in ancient Mesopotamia didn’t just circulate privately, it was often formalised in public records, scratched into clay for all eternity.

So why do we gossip? The word itself descended from godsibb (‘God sibling’), an Old English term for women who would support a friend or relative through childbirth.