Gossip: The Oldest Story Nobody Admits to Telling

Every school had one.

The kid who knew everything about everyone before anyone else did. Which teacher was in trouble with the principal. Which couple had broken up over the weekend. Whose parents were getting divorced. You despised them a little, the way you despise anyone who has something you want. And you wanted in, because how did this one person know all of this, and more importantly, could they be persuaded to tell you.

Gossip was unacademic. It questioned the character of anyone caught doing it. And yet the ones who had it held a kind of power that no amount of good grades could replicate.

I know both sides of this. I moved to a new school as a teenager. Miss goody two shoes, academically inclined, made friends quickly enough at first. And then, slowly, I didn’t. The friendships that had seemed open closed ranks. Years of shared history became blood bonds and the new girl was on the outside of all of them. Stories were being told about me that I wasn’t part of, in rooms I wasn’t in, and by the time they reached me they had already done their work.

It was the worst period of my academic life. Miserable and friendless in a way that leaves a mark. I’ve since repaired those relationships. We are friendly, even. But something calcified in me during those years that I still carry. My friends don’t enter the inner reaches of my heart. I didn’t really decid that it would be so. But somewhere in my conciousness, the lesson was learnt and I could never fully unlearn it. I keep people at a slight distance without meaning to. That’s what gossip can do when it turns against you.

It hurts in the moment. And then, it rewrites how you move through the world afterward.

That’s one side of it. Years later, I was leading a globally remote team. Every team member in a different city, a different country, a different timezone. No shared office, no corridor conversations, no accidental lunches. The kind of team that can work together for years and still feel like strangers. I started scheduling weekly meetings that began with everything except work. How everyone was doing, what was happening, what they’d noticed, what they’d heard. We talked about what other people in the company were doing. We discussed behaviours observed in meetings, motivations, subtext. We read between lines together. And the team grew closer. They relied on each other more. They covered for each other, championed each other, trusted each other in the way that actually makes work work.

What I was doing, without calling it that, was creating structured gossip. And it worked.

This made me curious about gossip itself. The etymology is interesting. Gossip comes from the Old English godsibb, meaning godparent, a person of deep trust and intimacy. In the Middle Ages it referred to the tight-knit community of women who gathered at a birth. The pregnant woman’s female relatives and neighbours congregating, talking, sharing. Gossip was originally what happened when women came together around something important. It was communal. It was caring. It was how a community held itself together. At some point in the 16th century it shifted.

Gossip became a person, mostly a woman, one who delights in idle talk. A newsmonger. A tattler. What had started as something women did together, something that bound a community, became something shameful. Something small. Something that questioned the character of anyone caught doing it.

Gossip did then what social media does now. It told people what was happening in the lives of everyone around them. It kept communities informed, connected, aware of who needed help and who was causing harm. It was the original network. And somewhere along the way it got the same treatment social media gets now. Blamed for the worst of what people do with it, while the rest of it, the connection, the intimacy, the shared making-sense-of-things, goes unexamined.

But gossip is storytelling. It has everything a story needs. A protagonist. A situation. Stakes. Tension. A revelation at the end that reframes everything before it. We construct these narratives constantly, in lowered voices, over coffee, in the ten minutes before a meeting starts properly. And we call it something smaller than storytelling because admitting otherwise would mean admitting how much of our social world is built on narrating each other to each other.

The story itself is neutral. What isn’t neutral is the teller. Gossip told with cruelty is a weapon. It finds the gap between someone and how they want to be seen, and it widens it. It builds a version of a person that travels faster than the person can correct it. By the time you know what is being said, the audience has already decided.

Gossip told with care is something else entirely. It is how a community protects its own. How people figure out who to trust and who to watch. How a new person in a room gets oriented before they make a costly mistake. How a team in different timezones finds its way to each other.

The story is the same.
The storyteller is everything.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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This post is a part of Blogchatter A2Z Challenge 2026 .

This is a series about storytelling beyond a craft. As something we live inside. In memory, in conversation, and in the way we understand what happens to us. Read all posts here.

I’ve done A2ZChallenge in 2017, where I collected 26 quotes by people whose names started with the letter of the day. In 2015, the theme was professional life.