I had the singular pleasure of visiting with a bunch of my high school friends the other week, and one of them put me on to a podcast I had not heard about before Normal Gossip. She said it was som…
I’m a fan of this historian, and this blog post tickled my brain. Hopefully you find it interesting.
I think she’s using it in the same sense as the Oxford dictionary “conversation about other people and their private lives” which is certainly closer to how people around me use it. Like a normal greeting to my friends would be “what’s the goss?” and they would tell me how their lives are going.
Specifically my experience is gossip is when femme presenting people discuss people. Before I transitioned doing the same things in a masculine context would be “shooting the shit” or “having a yarn”. Potentially some local regional variation.
Certainly calling someone a gossip has extremely negative connotations here, more in line with your perception. A gossip would be a femme presenting person (always) who has a reputation for spreading unkind information, often fictional, about people.
I think she’s using it in the same sense as the Oxford dictionary “conversation about other people and their private lives” which is certainly closer to how people around me use it. Like a normal greeting to my friends would be “what’s the goss?” and they would tell me how their lives are going.
Specifically my experience is gossip is when femme presenting people discuss people. Before I transitioned doing the same things in a masculine context would be “shooting the shit” or “having a yarn”. Potentially some local regional variation.
Certainly calling someone a gossip has extremely negative connotations here, more in line with your perception. A gossip would be a femme presenting person (always) who has a reputation for spreading unkind information, often fictional, about people.
Social grooming is the name of a behaviour among apes: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_grooming e.g. my wife adjusting my hair is social grooming. It’s just an academic term.