Gossip is often a favorite recreation and an innocent pastime at all levels of society, in all walks of life and in all ages,” those who have been embarrassed for no reason, or suffer from its radiation, will agree that “fire and sword are slow engines of destruction in comparison with the babbler.”
If you throw a stone on the quiet waters of a pond, you will see successive rings of ripples, one larger than the other. The effects of gossip are in no way dissimilar. “The flying rumours gathered”, wrote Pope, “and all who heard it made enlargement too; in every year it spread, on every tongue it grew.”
More people, it is said, get run down by gossip than by automobiles. Indeed, gossip has destroyed homes, ruined families and claimed lives. This canker often eats its way into the moral make up of an individual. It is deadly, it is destructive. “The strokes of the whip market marks in the flesh” (Ecclesiasticus) “but the stroke of the tongue breaketh bones.”
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All of us have our shortcomings, weaknesses and secret sins, which we would not like others to know or talk about. In the Bible, Christ gave forthright answer to the Pharisees when they dragged a public woman before him. “If there is any among you who is without sin, let him cast the first stone,” he said. In spite of our shortcomings, some people cannot pass a day without poking their nose into other people’s affairs or pointing out weeds in other people’s gardens.
What is more, they add, multiply, magnify and make a mountain out of a molehill; they look at the harmless actions of their neighbours with a debased and perverted mind and give them a shady complexion. Their whole point of gossip is to add two and two to make five.
Recently, a lecturer at a London University said, “Gossip can be a tonic to the women who are alone all day and crave adult conversation, or who have worries, which they must tell to someone. These gossipers – and there are nearly as many men as there are women – are merely finding a harmless and healthy outlet. But it is those gossipers who distort or enlarge upon the facts who should realize when to exercise discretion.”
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There are two reasons, it is said, why some people don’t mind their own business. One is that they haven’t any mind; the other is that they haven’t any business. “There exist thousands of subjects for elegant conversation”, says the Chinese proverb, “yet there are persons who cannot meet a cripple without talking about feet.”
A passage in the essay “Those People Next Door” from the book many furrows, reads somewhat like wagging of some tongues. It says “They (our neighbours) are always in the wrong. Consider the hours they keep – entirely different from our hours and therefore entirely reprehensible. If they do not offend by their extravagant piety, they shock you by their levity.
Perhaps they play tennis on Sunday, or perhaps they don’t, and in either case they are vulnerable to criticism. They always manage to be gay when you are sleepy. They take a delight in going away for more holidays than you can possibly have, or perhaps they don’t go away for holidays at all, in which case their inferiority is clearly established.
If they are not guilty of criminal waste, they can be convicted of shabby parsimony. They either dress too luxuriously or do not dress luxuriously enough for the decencies of the neighbourhood. We suspect that they are no better than they should be. Observe the frequency with which their servants come and go.
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Depend upon it, they find those people next door impossible. Their habits and their friends, the music they play, the pets that they keep, the politics they affect, the newspapers they read – all confirm our darkest fears.”
“It is possible to believe anything about them – especially the worst. What are those strange sounds that penetrate the wall in the small hours? Surely, that is the chink of coin! And those sudden shrieks and gusts of laughter? Is there not an alcoholic suggestion about such undisciplined hilarity? We know too much about them, and do not know enough.
They are revealed to us in fragments and in putting the fragments together we do not spare them. There is nothing so misleading as half-heard and half- understood scraps. And the curious thing about those people next door is that, if you ever come to know them, you find they are not a bit like what you thought they were.
You find to your astonishment that they have redeeming features. Perhaps they find that we have redeeming features, too. For, the chastening truth is that we all play the role of those people next door to somebody.
We are all being judged, and generally very unfavourably judged, by evidence which, if we know it, would greatly astonish us. It might help us to be a little more charitable about those people next door if we occasionally remembered that we are those people next door Gossip can be Dynamite ourselves.”
Mirrors, they say, reflect without speaking and some women speak without reflecting. A wise man, therefore, is always cautious while speaking. He sees that his tongue is not ahead of his judgment. He knows that “those who fling dirt at others, dirtied themselves most. Even if a babbler talks before him, he fellows little or no interest, the talebearer shall defile his own soul, and be hated by all; and he shall abide with him, shall be hateful: the silent and Wiseman shall be honoured” (Eccles. 21).
The other day, Bishop Fulton Sheen, of New York, speaking on his TV programme, said: “The separation of people into sheep and goats will take place only on the Last Day. Until then, we are forbidden to make the classification.” Finally, remember the lines of wisdom-
“There is so much good in the worst of us, And so much bad in the best of us, that it hardly behoves any of us, To talk about the rest of us.”