When I was in primary school, the teachers insisted, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything.” Alice Roosevelt Longworth, a famous socialite and gossip, took the opposite view. She kept a pillow on her sofa, needle-pointed with her still-popular motto, “If you can’t say something good about someone, sit right here by me.”
People who study gossip define it as any talk about people who are not present. It can be positive, neutral or negative, but it’s the mean-spirited variety – Alice Longworth’s favourite – that has traditionally inspired disapproval. For many of us, hearing and telling scandalous stories counts as a guilty pleasure.
And yet, gossip is by no means a black and white affair. We have a natural need for human connection, and gossip…
