SANDI TOKSVIG on gossip

The word on the street is that tittle-tattle should be avoided. But, says Sandi, could it be we have been misinformed...

If I tell you a secret, do you promise not to tell anyone? Okay, I don’t really have a secret. I only asked to try to raise your levels of oxytocin. I love this magazine. It provides a full service for all its readers. Great food, great advice and now an injection of the same hormone normally released during sex – all by turning to the back page.

Allow me to explain. The good folk at the University of Pavia in Italy have been investigating gossip. I don’t know these people, and I hate to say a bad word about anyone, but they clearly haven’t got enough to do. Anyway, if you like a good natter about others, you’ll be delighted to learn the Pavian professors have discovered it’s good for your health. It seems a good old chin-wag about the lives of those you know (or even those you don’t) releases oxytocin, which is the pleasure hormone. This delightful molecule is also known as the cuddle chemical. Those of us who like science have known for some time that our body releases oxytocin during mother-child bonding, before and after sex, and when we touch each other. What we didn’t know is that it also floods into the bloodstream when we gossip. Yes, being loose-lipped makes you feel alive.

I suppose gossip has always played a big part in human social interaction. Certainly it brings people closer together than, say, a chat about quantum mechanics. (There are chats about mechanics that can raise your oxytocin, but I think the mechanic needs to be very good-looking.)

The word gossip has an interesting origin. It comes from the Old English ‘godsibb’, meaning godfather or godmother, so literally ‘a person related to one in God’, but it came to mean close friend or confidante. Gossip had an evolutionary function in helping to build relationships between people who could depend on each other. I suppose the theory is you don’t want to fall out with someone close to you as they might go and talk to others about it.

The earliest recorded piece of gossip is about 3,500 years old. When it was starting out, ‘writing’ was a system called cuneiform, inscribed on clay tablets. Apparently there are some tablets from 1,500BC where, if your cuneiform is up to scratch, you can read about the Mesopotamian mayor who had an affair with a married woman. The Romans loved a bit of snarking. They had a poet, known as Martial, who made a good living out of scandal. He wrote, ‘Tongilianus, you paid two hundred for your house; An accident too common in this city destroyed it. You collected ten times more. Doesn’t it seem, I pray, That you set fire to your own house, Tongilianus?’ Clearly this accusation would have upset Tongilianus. People would have talked about it for days. If anyone’s oxytocin is raised by gossip it’s lawyers, who immediately think about the money they might make. Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1450 and people began suing each other over what was printed pretty soon after. While we’re on Gutenberg, did you know that one of his earlier businesses was making mirrors to sell to pilgrims going to see the four great relics of Aachen (St Mary’s cloak, Christ’s swaddling clothes, Christ’s loincloth and, my favourite, St John the Baptist’s beheading cloth) with the claim that they could capture the holy light given off by those fine items? Who knew that 500-year-old gossip could be interesting? The downside is that gossip can wound, and I never like to hurt anyone. If I’m going to do it, I’ll stick to people long gone, such as Gutenberg or the 19th-century Lady Colin Campbell. In 1886, London couldn’t hear enough about the divorce of Lady Colin. She was accused of adultery with all sorts of toffs, and the butler testified about what he’d seen her Ladyship get up to through the keyhole… How marvellous! I feel better already. My oxytocin is booming.

Scientists now say loose lips can make you feel alive