Water cooler gossip may sound like a modern concept, but the word scuttlebutt captured the same phenomenon over a century ago and remains current to this day. Deservedly so, for surely few words are so pleasing to the ear.
Not only that, but I dare to venture that the word’s sound also goes some way to conveying its meaning. That scuttle at the front suggests a small creature scurrying across the floor at night causing frights and alarums among the household’s occupants.
In fact, when you think about (as I just did), English is positively brimming with words denoting something unsavoury that begin with a hard sc- then a vowel. Think scar, scurry, scurvy, scowl, scandal, scatter, scurrilous and, I’m sure, scountless others.
As for scuttlebutt, its literal meaning, from around 1800, is “water cask kept on a ship's deck”. It comes from scuttle (opening in a ship's deck) + butt (barrel). Some time around 1900 some inventive soul noticed that sailors tended to hang around the scuttlebutt while gossiping - just as you do around the water cooler when you should be slaving over a hot keyboard, you layabout - and the modern meaning was born.
We can thank seafarers for a host of contemporary everyday terms. The nautical origins of many are still obvious - all at sea, bail out, on the rocks, and so on. But others are less so. The earliest recorded meaning for skyscraper (1794) was “light sail at the top of a mast”. The phrase in the offing draws on a nautical term for the more distant part of the sea as seen from the shore; a ship in the offing was just visible to those on land. When you’re short of money and hard up, you’re like a ship that's run aground and unable to free itself.
As for gossip, it’s had a tough run over its lifetime. It comes from the Old English godsibb, which meant sponsor or godparent. The word was a compound of god (no introduction needed) + sibb “relative” (which is where we also get sibling). By the mid 1300s, gossip’s meaning had become slightly diluted to include any familiar acquaintance, especially woman friends invited to attend a birth. But by the mid 1500s, it could mean anyone engaging in familiar or idle talk, and by the early 1800s its meaning included not just the person doing the talk, but such talk itself.
That downward trend in the status of the word’s meaning is not uncommon. Awful once meant “inspiring awe”. Egregious originally meant outstandingly good. In the 1300s, a naughty person was someone who had nothing, but might still be of good character.
Words can also take an upward trajectory. Knight originally meant a lowly boy or servant, fond once meant foolish, and brave meant barbarous.
The process by which word meanings gradually change over time is called semantic shift, and - as with egregious - the shift can be so great that a word comes to mean the polar opposite of what it first did.
It might be stretching things too far to say gossip has undergone such an extreme transformation; after all, many people regard it as an essential glue that holds communities together.
If you’ll forgive me getting all moral for a moment, I’m more inclined to regard gossip as corrosive. A definition used by some sociologists and psychologists for gossip is “evaluative talk about a person who is not present”, and that, for me, says it all. That puts me offside with Alice Roosevelt, who once famously stated, “if you can't say something good about someone, sit right here by me.” So taken was she by this aphorism that she had it sewn onto a cushion in a room where she held parties.
Whatever your view, one thing that’s almost certain is that as long as there are people on the planet, there’ll also be gossip. Why we do it is a matter of endless conjecture and, occasionally, academic research. British anthropologist Robin Dunbar has written on its value as a form of social glue. He’s head of the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford - and if that imposing title is not a reason for a non-specialist like me to say he may be right, I don’t know what is.
Dunbar’s main popular claim to fame, however
is Dunbar’s number, a measurement of the “cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships”. My wife informs me that Ken’s number differs from Dunbar’s in that while his is a positive integer, mine approaches zero. Like Dunbar, she also holds a most imposing, if somewhat shorter, title, and if that’s not a reason for me to say she may also be right … well, you know the rest.
Bits and specious
In the novel Treasure Island, pirate Long John Silver utters the phrase shiver me timbers seven times.
In 2011, former Guardian writer Tim Radford came up with 25 rules for journalists. They were spot on then and they’re still spot on now.
The youngest person to sail around the world solo was 16-year-old Laura Dekker of the Netherlands. But you won’t find her achievement listed in the Guinness Book of World Records, because its publisher doesn’t want to encourage young people to sail around the world alone.
I discovered Patti Smith in my late teens, and everything about her was a shock and a revelation. She was loud, abrasive, profane, defiant, tender, outrageously articulate and wrote the most amazing songs. In a world where male musicians were largely fuelled by testosterone and female musicians were mostly sweet, she refused to be defined by gender at all. I was also discovering modern American poetry at the time, much of which shared her dismissal of received wisdom - instead looking for an authentic voice to capture the full breadth of human experience. Today, Patti Smith continues to matter, and this wonderful article says a lot about why that is.
Quote of the week
I have Social Disease. I have to go out every night. If I stay home one night I start spreading rumours to my dogs.
Andy Warhol
I loved the examples of semantic shift, how fascinating! My favourite English one might be “terrific”, which comes from the same root as “terror”. Its meaning was very confusing to me when I was learning the language, coming from a Latin language background.