| gossip | |
| noun | |
| 1. | light informal conversation for social occasions |
| 2. | a report about the behavior of other people; "the divorce caused much gossip" |
| 3. | a person given to gossiping and divulging personal information about others |
For the last five weeks or so, I’ve been wanting to find time to have a chat with an acquaintance of mine who I’m told has said something rather malicious about me to a third person who I barely know. Now normally I don’t mind if I’m the subject of gossip… what a boring life you would have to be leading if no one ever spoke about you? It rarely bothers me, so long as people stick to my actual indiscretions rather than fanciful or constructed ones. Most people who know me personally would probably hear gossip about me and either a) take it with a grain of salt or b) think… ‘yes that sounds like something that Borys would do’. So honest to goodness gossip so long as the facts are steeped in truth… is all fine by me.
I doubt there’s a soul on the planet who hasn’t indulged in the time honoured past time of discussing common acquaintances with their friends. Since time immemorial it has been the traditional method of keeping up to date with what our friends might be up to. Or at least it WAS before Facebook et al came along and altered the social landscape. So no, I don’t really have a problem with idle chatter amongst friends about other friends.
But as I started out saying, several weeks ago I found out that someone who I had thought of as a friend (though admittedly not an overly close friend) took it upon herself to say some deliberately spiteful and potentially damaging things to a third person who I had only recently just met. This new acquaintance doesn’t hardly know me at all and might have listened to the ill considered nonsense that my So Called Friend decided to thrust upon her. And this is the sort of gossip makes me seriously twitch.
So I’ve been wanting to find time to go and talk to my So Called Friend about the incident in question but I’ve been prevented from seeing her at social outings where our paths might have crossed due to illness, then rushing off to the ER with girly swot issues and now illness again (yes i have the flu… again!). A number of weeks have past and it’s annoying the hell out of me that I’ve not managed to broach the issue in as timely a fashion as I should have wished to.