The Grapevine Art Salon

Miscellany: A Gallery for Related Materials

Gossip

An in-depth look at the word gossip can be found in Russell Lockhart’s Words as Eggs: Psyche in Language and Clinic (Dallas: Spring Publications, l983, 152-3):

“By slowing down, by tending to the word’s hidden images, one is able to get beneath the conceptual surface of a word’s speedy usage .... In this light consider what is hiding in an innocent and everyday word such as gossip. We know conceptually that it means telling secrets about another’s intimate life. Psychologically, gossip is an attempt to reveal what is hidden and is the everyday mechanism of ‘the secret will out.’ So, let’s gossip a bit about this word .... The first thing to discover is that its modern spelling is a mask, a disguise, a hiding of its former spelling in early English: g-o-d-s-i-b. There are two elements here: god and sib. The god is our modern word ‘God.’ The sib, meaning ‘kinsman,’ is familiar to us in a modern word such as sibling. A godsib was literally a ‘kinsman in God.’”

Godsib, then, was originally godparent, a person “privy to the family’s intimate life,’ with a sacred obligation to carry out. Lockhart continues, “With the secularization of the church and the consequent breakdown of the boundaries of sacred duties, the carrying of secrets was bound no longer by sacred trust. The word was commonized into meaning ‘friend’ and ‘companion.’

Finally, the word gossip “came to mean its very opposite–one who is too free with the secret, one who freely wags the tongue without any sense of the sacred embedded and still alive in this word.”

Searching further, Lockhart finds:

“The Indo-European root of God is gheu-, and this root carries the image of ‘to invoke by calling.’ Hidden here is the old belief that by calling out the name of something one would invoke its presence. Such secret names were always jealously guarded because whoever had the name had the power. One senses something of this power when we gossip. There is a power in knowing and telling secret things. We do not think of gossip as a particularly religious activity, but the word’s roots and its history reveal an image of god hidden at the bottom of the word. Perhaps that is also why we always feel just a bit hesitant before gossiping and just a bit guilty for having done it. We have broken a sacred obligation in this sort of telling.”

And who is one of the gods hidden at the bottom of the word? Here are some clues:

“Another word from this root gheu- is the Old English word gydig which meant “possessed” and “mad.” It has since become our modern word giddy. We get giddy when we gossip. We are a little possessed and a bit mad when we gossip. It is well to remember that at the bottom of every possession is a divine power. The gods are well-hidden in our everyday practice of gossiping to and about one another. As Jung might say, it’s not so much that we have gossip but that gossip has us.”

Broadening the background of the word still further, we look over Lockhart’s shoulder to find:

“The root for sib is seu- a marvelously rich root that gives rise not only to sibling as we have seen but also to so many words of specific interest to our psychology: self, suicide, secret, seduce, sure, ethic, custom, haetera, and swami among others. Obviously, gossip hides a great deal. Surely, gossip involves secrets, is a custom, involves ethics, is seductive .... We can even see that something as everyday as gossip leads via an etymological fantasy to the Self ....”

Lockhart concludes his discussion of this word-egg with these comments:

“Unveiling the images through the old word meanings at the bottom of the word gossip, recovering a bit of the word’s history, something of its forgotten story, puts us in a position to hear the echoes of this word differently now. Perhaps the next time you gossip, you may hear the echoes of these images that still live behind the shell of this little word.”

The point in reviewing Lockhart’s splendid work is to give dimension to the name of our website.

Story

From a conversation with Carl Jung as reported in Laurens Van Der Post’s The Voice of the Thunder (London: Chatto & Windus, l993, 124):

“He went on, in that deep bass voice of his, to tell me, at great length, how his work as a healer did not take wing ... until he realized that the key to the human personality was its story. Every human being at core, he held, had a unique story and no man could discover his greatest meaning unless he lived and, as it were, grew his own story.”

Nor no woman either, we suspect.