Gossip used to be a solemn word. In Old English a godsibb was a godparent: somebody made your relative (the sib in sibling) in the sight of God, at a christening. Over the next few centuries it widened to mean a close friend, and especially the women who came to sit with a neighbour while she gave birth. It isn’t hard to guess what happened next. A birth takes hours, the room is full of people who know one another well, and somebody has to pass the time. By the 1500s the word could mean anyone given to idle talk, and the people had turned into what they talked about. That seems unfair to them. They were there for the most serious hours of a neighbour’s life, and all the language kept was the chatter in between.