In the leadup to Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s New York City wedding, the rumor mill went into overdrive.
In the absence of any concrete confirmation from the couple’s team, rumors and gossip about the details – what the couple wore or whether her cats walked her down the aisle – became endless fodder for TikTok and the nightly news.
The real details are only really known by the couple and their guests. The rest of us are left only with gossip.
So, as part of NPR’s “Word of the Week” series and as a gift to the newlyweds, we’re looking into the origins of the word “gossip.”
Where does it come from?
Gossip’s roots go back to Old English, according to Jess Zafarris, author of several books on etymology including Useless Etymology: Offbeat Word Origins for Curious Minds. It stems from the old word, “godsibb,” meaning “sponsor or godparent.”
It then became a part of Middle English and started to describe a close friend or neighbor, Zafarris said. That became the “stepping stone” for today’s notion of gossip.
“It was especially used as a word for women friends who got together often for social occasions,” she said. “According to gendered stereotypes, what do women friends do when they get together socially? They chat idly about the people and the happenings in their lives.”
There are even some records from around the 1600s that indicated the word was used to refer to a woman’s female friends who were invited to be present at a birth, Zafarris said.
Around the 16th century, “gossip” started to carry a negative, gendered connotation, as it started to be used to refer to women who liked to spread rumors, Zafarris said.
Gossip as a feminist act?
Silvia Federici, a longtime feminist writer, thinker and professor, said that gossip’s derogatory transformation reflected societal shifts. While some women once held some power, an increasingly misogynist society at the end of the Middle Ages began to dismiss them.
Federici says in the early Middle Ages, women held some power and were valued in the community. In medieval society in Europe, for example, a woman could go to court and directly accuse a man of a crime. Two centuries later, she wouldn’t be able to do that, Federici explained.
In researching her book Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women, Federici says she found proclamations published in Europe encouraging husbands to keep their wives at home and to forbid them from going outside and talking.
Federici says the negative transformation of “gossip” was a means to denigrate women, to lessen their position in society and ultimately to control them.
By around the 17th century, she says the original meaning of the word was lost completely.
Women’s gossip is then identified “with idleness … with waste … with social rebelliousness,” she said. Federici believes society cannot view the devaluation of gossip as separate from the devaluation of women’s life, actions and knowledge.
Good Girls Gossip author Tova Leigh believes Federici’s analysis of gossip holds a lot of truth.
With a caveat: “Of course, malicious gossip exists. I’m certainly not defending cruelty. But I think we’ve ended up confusing all female conversation with its worst examples, and that’s a shame.”
Leigh believes good gossip should be embraced and reclaimed.
“I’d love women to feel less ashamed of gathering together and talking,” she said in an email. “When women feel safe enough to tell the truth about their lives, incredible things happen. They stop pretending. They stop competing. They realise they’re not alone. That’s the type of ‘gossip’ I’d love us to reclaim.”
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