At its most basic, gossip is just one person talking to another about someone who isn’t present. That means, definitionally, that prayer requests are gossip. Speculation in the media about which baseball team Shohei Ohtani is going to sign with is gossip. A doctor conferring with a colleague over an X-ray is gossiping about their patient just like two friends sending each other Taylor Swift’s posts on IG are gossiping. In modern parlance, we also say “gossip” when we mean slander, libel, or hate speech. We call celebrity news, calls from our mom, and whisper networks gossip. Even in scientific
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