Background information

This is from the best-selling 2008 book Watching the English by Kate Fox, who is a social anthropologist and director of the Social Issues Research Centre at the University of Oxford. The book is a cultural description of English ways of communicating (on topics like the weather or money) and behaving (at home, in the workplace or in the pub). She observes people’s behaviour, but also, as a social scientist, interviews people and conducts social experiments to reveal the social rules or underlying codes and customs. Other topics in the book include dress codes, ways of eating, queuing, and — the extract here — social gossip.

Gossip is a social way to talk about other people and their private lives or about things that are not important. The writer and other researchers found that when people gossip there are social patterns in the choice of topic and the way of talking about it. The phrase in the title, gossip rules, refers to the rules or patterns that are found in how people gossip, but it is ambiguous and might mean that gossip rules or governs our lives.