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If that is so, then gossip (whatever its individual destructiveness, which can be awesome—ask Othello) also serves as a profound daily act of community. In her novel Happy All the Time, Laurie Colwin has a character who prefers to call gossip "emotional speculation." Right. Through the great daily bazaar of bitchiness (men can be just as bitchy as women) passes a dense and bewildering parade of follies. They involve sex and money and alcohol and children and jobs and cruelty and treachery:
mostly variations on the seven deadly sins. Gossip is a safe way of sorting out this amoral brawl. It is a form of improvisational daydreaming. "Both the virtue and vice of gossip," write Sabini and Silver, "is that one doesn't confront accusers, or demand proof.. .
Gossip is transitional between things merely said, or even half said, and positions taken in the public domain. Gossip is a training ground for both self-clarification and public moral action."
Gossip is the layman's mythmaker and moralist, the small, idle interior puppet-theater in which he tries out new plays, new parts for himself.
—By Lance Morrow