07/06/2025
Gossip
Noun: casual or unconstrained conversation or reports about other people, typically involving details that are not confirmed as being true: “he became the subject of much local gossip”
Verb: engage in gossip:
“they would start gossiping about her as soon as she left” Similar
spread rumours, spread gossip, circulate rumours, spread stories.
I had a fascinating conversation with my 22 year old son last night about what essentially boiled down to the influence of gossip. He was telling me about how he noticed that his impression of a new person, let’s call them Jeff, had been coloured by the negative opinion of a friend, let’s call her Nancy. Before my son met Jeff, his friend Nancy had told him her negative opinion of Jeff. My son noticed that when he met Jeff he was filtering his own experience of Jeff through the negative lens of Nancy.
My son was reflecting with me on what his opinion of Jeff might have been without the influence of Nancy’s perspective. My son described this as an experience of social engineering and we went on to have a long conversation about how our realities are socially constructed and the pros and cons of hearing another person’s opinion on someone. He’s a very smart young man as you can tell!
As this conversation was in the context of a negative opinion being shared, this got me thinking about the power of a whispered word and how easily we can accept a confidently expressed opinion as fact. I can think of times when I’ve allowed my own perspective of a person to be skewed by another, joined in with gossip or ignored my own red flags about a gossiper due their apparent confidence and charm. The gossiper’s power is significant - think of Iago in Othello and of Machiavelli, the unscrupulous politician.
In this era of ‘fake news’ let’s make a commitment to bringing more personal discernment to negative gossip and fact check casual critical chat about other people’s character’s or organisations 💙
Image by Cup of Couple on Pexel
