Loose lips may sink political ships. But they also launch literary flights- The Globe and Mail
Unlike most philosophers, the gossip cares about the humour and heartbreak of courtship, the transgression of social mores and the quirky perversity of people around us – the very things that the great fiction writers, from Jane Austen to Alice Munro, immortalize in their stories.
As Ms. Spacks notes, the word gossip originally meant “godparent.” We can trace the shifting shades of the word in Samuel Johnson's great 18th-century dictionary: A gossip was both “one who answers for the child in baptism” and “one who runs about tattling like women at a lying-in.”
