Dishing Dirt

Not all gossip is bad. Here’s how to quash the meanspirited kind

- Katherine Ashenburg

WHEN I WAS in elementary school, the nuns told us, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything.”

Alice Roosevelt Longworth, President Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter, and a famous 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 feeds that, for good and ill. Much depends on the motivation of the gossiper: are they aiming to warn people about a bad actor, or are they enjoying the malicious pleasure of spreading a harmful story? It comes down to curbing the mean variety while benefiting from the useful.

Why We Gossip

The reasons why people indulge in gossip or shun it are as individual as they are. In 20 years of friendship, I have never heard Lyndsay Green, a sociologist and author, dish the dirt about anyone. When I asked her why she never gossips, she traced her behaviour back to her school days—and her own sense of security.