We don’t actually whisper gossip, we shout it from the rooftop, because that’s just the way Texas women are raised. It’s always better when the person being gossiped about is not present, but I’ve let slip a time or three some information that might not have been appropriate since the target was within arm’s reach.

Oprah had a program last week about rude behavior, and she asked the audience to answer a few questions using a punch-button keypad they held in their hands. “Have you ever gossiped?” was the question. The percentage answers immediately appeared on a large screen. No surprises...97% answered, ‘yes.’ She then asked for a show of hands representing the 3% (who wanted to be on television) so they answered, ‘no.’ The one man who rose and suggested that he never wanted to hurt anyone’s feelings was boo’ed, laughed at and gossiped about even as he sat down in total humiliation from the audience’s response. She couldn’t get the other two ‘no’ people to identify themselves...du’uh, but one woman raised her hand and said that her mother who was sitting next to her had accidentally pushed the no button which shows you that you must never take your ‘Ancient One’ to the Oprah show. The reason you GO to the Oprah show is to gossip about your Ancient One, for pity’s sake!

Gossip did not begin with the first human...it required the first three humans...two people to gossip about the third, and I suspicion that they switched around on that alot. The first three people obviously consisted of two women and one man because two women could spend the entirety of their day talking about their man whilst he was out hunting and gathering in order to keep them healthy enough to continue their daily discussions. If the world started with two men and one woman, she would have no one to gossip with except maybe the babies she kept on having, one right after the other since the men had plenty of time on their hands after talking about sports.

I think that none of us would ever gossip again if we could hear the gossip being tossed around about OURSELVES, but then Gawd protects us in that strange way most of the time. And, he’s the one who put the gossip gene in our DNA in the first place and called it ‘human nature.’ That’s an umbrella under which MUCH can be accomplished, hashed out or rifled through in order to make an insane world seem somewhat operational. Here’s the best advice I ever got when being in total angst about what someone might be saying about ME...”KK, just THINK about how much time other people spend NOT talking about you or even thinking about you. This gave me a distorted sense of comfort and serves me to this day...huh???

KK

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Gossiping is just plain fun. In Texan language the very worst comments are followed by, ‘bless her heart.’ That makes everything okay and no matter what you have said you come out smelling like a rose…or maybe a Baptist. For example: “Whooowee! Her face is as ugly as a big ole elephant vagina, id’n it? Bless her heart.”

These days you can’t help noticing the things people decide to wear out in public. And, if they can do that then they are fair game in my book. If you are going to go out into the world in a t-shirt with ANYTHING written on it then you deserve to be ridiculed. Unless the t-shirt says something like, ‘I’m deaf, please yell’ or something useful like that. If you look like you just woke up and you’re still wearing your bath robe at the wine aisle at HEB then I am allowed to say anything, even if it’s within earshot of you. Sometimes gossip is called for and, the check-out girls at the grocery store are particularly receptive.

Gossip can be good too, you know. It doesn’t always have to be demeaning, although that is more fun. You could say, “Look at those calf-length tights that girl has on with those yellow high heels. She’s hot.” That’s gossip too, isn’t it? If it’s good then does that mean it’s not gossip?

Here is the definition of ‘gossip’ in Wikipedia:

Gossip is idle talk or rumor, especially about the personal or private affairs of others. It forms one of the oldest and most common means of sharing facts and views, but also has a reputation for the introduction of errors and other variations into the information thus transmitted. (I think this means people exaggerate and embellish on the truth in order to make a better story or hate that person more than they deserve).

The term also carries implications that the news so transmitted (usually) has a personal or trivial nature, as opposed to normal conversation. ( I think this means instead of talking about the weather or politics you think it is more fun to debase that guy whose socks never match and smells like gin at nine o’clock in the morning).

Over the last decade, gossip has come to the attention of academia as a fruitful avenue of study, particularly in light of its relationship to both overt and implicit power structures. (I don’t have the faintest idea of what the hell this means).

My guess is the person who thought up this pseudo-intellectual piece-of-crappy idea of how to do a definition thinks pretty highly of himself and should come down off his high horse and calm down.

Is that gossip?

SalGal