Gossip  

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Dubious anecdotes: Suetonius, Brantome and Tallemant

Gossip consists of casual or idle talk between friends. While officially value neutral, the term often specifically refers to talk of scandal, slander, or schadenfreude relating to known associates of the participants, and discussed in an underhand or clandestine manner.

While gossip forms one of the oldest and (still) the most common means of spreading and sharing facts and views, it also has a reputation for the introduction of errors and other variations into the information thus transmitted. The term also carries implications that the news so transmitted (usually) has a personal or trivial nature. Compare conversation.

Some people commonly understand gossip as meaning the spreading of rumor and misinformation, as (for example) through excited discussion of scandals. Some newspapers carry "gossip columns" which retail the social and personal lives of celebrities or of élite members of certain communities.

Gossip has recently come into the academy as a fruitful avenue of study, particularly in light of its relationship to both overt and implicit power structures. Compare discourse.

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Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Gossip" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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