Passing an easy afternoon hour in the Great Southern Hotel's lobby recently, my ears perked up at those fateful words guaranteed to grab anybody's attention.
She wasn't supposed to be home so early that Wednesday…" A few tables away two ladies were in deep conclave, unspooling a tale concerning an errant husband engaged in the very opposite of social distancing. Shielding myself with an open newspaper, I leaned nearer to catch more of the story.
"Turns out it was going on since the Macra night last February and the pair of…"
Suddenly the conversation stopped dead. I waited, perched on the edge on my chair, only to hear an icy voice: "Why don't you join us altogether, you'll be able to hear better."
Caught rotten I was, nailed to the floor for the crime of gossip mongering. With cheeks as red as Rudolph's nose, I skulked mortifyingly away into Killarney's staycation bustle. Worse, I never did discover the fate of that delinquent spouse.
Then, a few days later, none other than Pope Francis himself threw his weight behind the subject. On his weekly Vatican address to the crowds in St Peter's Square, he urged the congregation: "Please, brothers and sisters, let us not gossip. Gossiping is a worse plague than Covid. The devil is the great gossip."
Ah here, with a mass lockdown on the way, hospitals overflowing and Ryanair grounded - now we have to forgo one of the few bits of social pleasure left available to us? Bless me, Father, but giving up the auld bit of scandalising might well be a pandemic measure too far.
"Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality," was Oscar Wilde's opinion, a view supported by columnist Liz Smith who wrote "gossip is news running ahead of itself in a red satin dress".
The urge to tattle is as old as time itself. In his book Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology Robin Dunbar sees gossip as an instrument of communal order, similar to the grooming with which our primate cousins tended to their social relationships. Nowadays, grooming has evolved beyond apes picking fleas off one another to instead bonding by the passing on of social information.
Idle chatter now serves the same purpose of network building as fur cleaning did for our chimpanzee ancestors. So rather than arm ourselves with pitchforks and flaming torches to banish gossip as a fetid swamp of malicious malcontents, why not accept it as a natural human activity - a form of storytelling to enliven an otherwise dull day. Gossip may be publicly derided by many, but probably what everybody secretly enjoys. Or, as Bertrand Russell put it: "No one gossips about other people's secret virtues."
So, even though it may place me on a collision course with Vatican teachings, I aim to continue enjoying rumours, whispers and scuttlebutt. In fact, I'm thinking of getting a T-shirt printed with the words of writer Alice Roosevelt Longworth: "If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody come sit next to me."
Man who made us click
This week 166 years ago something remarkable happened in Cork. George Boole, professor of mathematics at UCC, published An Investigation of the Laws of Thought - laying down what would become Boolean algebra.
A numerical logic that formed the basis of the technological age, it powers the processing unit of every computer, and underpinned the creation of the internet itself. So every time you click your mouse or ask Google what time Tesco closes, take a moment to thank the man who started it all.
Poor protection
Sign spotted in a Waterford pub window last week: "When you see how people put on their face masks, is it any wonder some contraceptives fail."
"gossip" - Google News
September 28, 2020 at 08:30AM
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Well, holy God - is gossip a bad thing? - Independent.ie
"gossip" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2QfcAx1
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