Gossip from Linguistic Point of View
Gossip is a very bad thing that should be avoided but somehow inevitably lovable. It is regarded as unpleasant and antisocial conversation that might result a kind of destruction of indvidual’s reputations and even malicious. It happens not only for celebrities but also people around us. Gossip becoming more intense when a certain group of people is a becoming a minority. In this case, we are Indonesian people who live in Brisbane as part of a very tiny group society compare to multicultural society in Brisbane. In a group of the minority gossip spread very quickly that may be because the group can mostly be comfortable talking about their problems in their easiest language (native).
Apart from that, lets consider some different view about gossip. Gossip can be a mean where people keep in touch with their values among the community. People use language to gossip and language is used to negotiate social relationship which provides any ways to negociate social values. The values that we are talking are about behaving and misbehaving, acceptable and unacceptable attitude. It is involving a moral judgement that intriguing a communal shared set of values. When we are involved, we modify our own values and we place them into a context of other people’s value. We, then, are curious about other’s value by checking other’s opinion and interpretation to a certain point of discussion (gossip).
The bad side of gossiping (most part of the side is bad) is when the Grice’s (1975) set of rules about language is not fulfilled by the coversationalist.
- Quantity: provide as much information as the exchange requires Do not provide Information than the exchange requires
- Relation: be relevant
- Quality: try to say what is true, don’t say what you believe to be false, don’t say anything you don’t have supporting evidence for
- Manner: be clear, avoid obscurity, avoid ambuguity, be brief, be orderly
Why gossip is associated to be a very bad things because conversationalists break this rule. Sometimes, coversatinalists never mean to give information than it is required to. By the slip of tongue, they add or modify information to make it more alive and may be fun without considering the consequencies. Or when they do it by accident, they are reluctant to fix the information they have already said. It mostly happens and results to mesleading information that finally ending with unpleasant information or ruining individual’s reputation. Being irrelevant to the topic being discussed will put another meaning and conversationalists tend to relate some irrelevant information without re-questioning. Relevancy as the second rule play an important role as well in developing gossip. The vital rule concerning gossip lies in the third rule. When conversationalists want to deliver information without enough supporting evidence and without being critical to the informtion they get. They do not have any "is it true?" statement when they consume the info. They are lazy to convince the truth about the story. It just Simon said … Simon said …Simon said …Simon said …. And every Simon can not be guaranted to give accurate information and follows the Grice’s rule of language. The last rule supporting the gossip language as well as gossip might be not clear, full of ambiguity and full of disorder.
It is inevitable to gossip even we are aware of it.
to be continued …
