Gossip girl, gossip boy and why we love to gossip

Lady Whistledown (left) in a still from the popular Netflix series 'Bridgerton'.

Anybody will tell you that gossiping is a sin. Nobody wants to be called a gossip, that’s for sure. And yet the act of gossiping, of mixing facts and fiction, of verbally combining all genres from speculative fiction to whodunits, stand-up comedy, mimicry and mime, is a big hit with humans. "Give me the goss," we say on arrival anywhere.

Oh, that lovely moment during a lull in the conversation when someone bends conspiratorially towards you so that only you can hear. Or sentences that begin with "did you know?", "don’t tell anybody", "I shouldn’t be saying this but…". It is all our ears can do to not jump off the sides of our heads, while we affect a cool façade even as our hearts thump and blood goes into high tide. That moment between not knowing and then knowing it all is the slowest of slow motions.

The awareness that someone somewhere is surely gossiping about us rarely stops us from gossiping. It is an openly delicious form of public discourse, going as it does behind the back of a mutual acquaintance.

In early primitive days, when men and women were told to get themselves different planets — Mars for men and Venus for women — it was rumoured that only women gossiped. This theory was debunked soon after when women reached the workplace and found men lingering at the village well more often than them. The word "gossip" immediately lost its pinkness and began to look very blue. So, that’s the positive: gossip cuts across all genders.

Many a time, life, as we know it, changes in a minute with this new knowledge, a pssst in lowered tones, in a pitch we barely catch. Gossip passes on whispers that are distorted with every whispering until it whispers across to the very person it is about. Being gossiped about, as one can imagine, is radically different from gossiping yourself. Then suddenly it all becomes lies, slander and utter rubbish. This ability to see a piece of gossip in its historical and human context is possible only when one occasionally features in the gossip themselves.

Tabloids with their page 3 and yellow journalism can never go out of fashion. Of course, we want to know which stock is up and which stock is down; of course we want to read film and book reviews and hear about the latest restaurant to dine in. But most of all, we must know the Achilles’ heel of every Achilles there is. That is the only way we keep abreast with the latest.

Lady Whistledown’s scandal sheet in TV series Bridgerton scythes through high society and still they wait with bated breath for it. Aristocracy downwards, there is a thirst for secrets and confessions, for that journey back to the elusive first-person baring of heart in a moment of weakness or drunkenness. The fact that Prince Harry has so many grouses against his father and brother is keeping many newspapers in business.

Monetising gossip was a natural corporate turn. Innuendoes are made all the time and classified information will always be leaked. Gossip is the oldest entertainment industry.