Idle gossip doesn’t bother me. Who’s doing who, who got caught for what, I don’t care. I don’t even care if people gossip about me. In my experience it’s:
- correct, which is fine, or
- wrong, and facts will win out in time, or
- vicious, and no one I care about would believe a lie about me
Sometimes people use gossip about other’s misfortune as entertainment. I know I’ve done it myself. For example, I’m a little sad we didn’t get the double Laura / Marco hurricane we were promised last week. Disasters far away are dramatic and juicy, and I give myself a pass when I talk about them.
Sometimes, instead of looking for disasters far afield, someone is so starved for drama they look to their friends, and if there is indeed a delicious disaster among their friends, people feed off that drama. It happens. Your friend has had a crisis, then all the friends discuss the details, no doubt with compassion, but looking for a little attention and excitement too.
But that’s when your friend has a crisis. Sometimes, some bland little hiccup occurs, and people, again looking for drama and attention, gin the hiccup up into death and destruction so they can be more entertained. Let’s say someone named Jane has a cough and feels tired, and the next thing you know, your friends are all sending Facebook thoughts and prayers for Jane as she battles lung cancer. Then Jane sighs and questions the value of these friends who evidently are so bored they want her to have lung cancer.
I say this as a hypothetical, “Jane” is not a real person I know, and my friends don’t imagine I have lung cancer, and I am pretty sure if I did they would ignore it after a Very Special Cancer Girls Night Out.
But still, it’s so galling when I see this. To be fair, I suppose the same gossipers do give themselves lung cancer too when they have a cough or a hiccup. Still annoying.
7 responses to “Gossip”
Some grapevines are a little hiccupy. When I was seriously dating and then got engaged and then got married, I had random people on a particular grapevine keep congratulating me for a stage I was not yet at. I’m like… a little early, folks. To be fair, a certain number of these people had both hearing loss and memory loss, but also to be fair, some didn’t. (but, I supposed, could have received their news from someone who did have hearing/memory loss?) It was fine-ish, but it was… challenging… to know exactly how to respond to someone who is enthusiastic about you having recently gotten married, when you haven’t.
Whee! First comment. I read your blog for years many years ago, then lost you, now found you again (I hope that doesn’t sound too creepy.)
I’m not a big blog commenter (commentator?), so I have no idea why I picked today to come out of the woodwork, except to say I call these people tragedy vultures and it IS really annoying.
KC – oh, I don’t mind speculative gossip as much when it’s about something positive. It’s annoying, but not spiteful.
AH (hi, AH!) – Not creepy at all. I love the term. Tragedy vulture – people just determine that something bad will happen, even if everything is fine. The sky is full of them.
Yeah, I don’t mind inaccurate positive gossip anywhere near as much as people who are spreading negative stuff and wanting it to be true. I still don’t enjoy socially-awkward moments, though. (can you imagine if you self-publish The Novel and were really quite proud of 100 people *who aren’t even related to you* buying it, thankyouverymuch, because that *is* impressive for a first self-published book, and then someone came up to congratulate you on your Great Book Deal With Famous Publishing House? Like… what do you even say?)
Also, “tragedy vulture” is an excellent term. (and some tragedy vultures carry slingshots, so beware…)
KC – I see – that is almost as annoying. Putting you in a position where you have to take your accomplishments down a peg. That is spiteful and a notch more passive-aggressive.
Well, it’s not necessarily spiteful – in some cases, it’s just something that “grows” through the gossip chain, possibly as Person A tries to get Person B as excited about your new book as they think they should be, or people are sloppy. (“oh, what publisher?” “I can’t remember – what are the publishers I know of? Maybe…” – and then it gets codified in the next transmission into whatever publisher out of the list the other person remembers.)(I mean, inflation can also happen with grades or test scores or salary offers or whatever; “she got a really good grade!” [thinking B+] “I’m so glad to hear it!” [thinking A+, tells next person A+])
But where spiteful, it well-deserves a smacking! But where non-spiteful, it’s just sort of collectively unpleasant and awkward, especially if the person congratulating you denigrates what you actually accomplished in the course of their erroneous congratulations, like “I was so excited to hear that you got a publishing deal! I mean, self-pub books are mostly trash, even when they somehow sell a couple hundred copies, but getting in with an actual publisher is a real thing!”
I guess: it can take malign intent to result in an extremely awkward situation, or it can just take… the problems with human communication and grapevines in general… But yes. I would be less likely to be *mad* about the gossip chain if there was no malign intent behind it. Still unpleasant/awkward/wet-blanket-y, but one doesn’t get *mad* (okay, except at the general systemic things, like “augh! grapevines and their inaccuracies! so obnoxious!” in much the same sort of way that you might rail at the mold growing in your toilet).
KC – I think I would prefer that kind of gossip, annoying though it is, as there is an absence of malice.