Gossip is a story where the main character isn’t allowed to speak.

What makes gossip so fluent is the absence of the one person who could complicate it. Nobody is there to say that is not how it went, so the story improves with each telling and hardens into the version everybody knows. The people listening are not being malicious, they are receiving an account with no defence attached. It is a trial where only one side turned up.

When a story arrives about somebody, ask whether you would repeat it with them standing there. Say the boring correction if you have one. And when you want to know something about a person, the person is usually available.