{"id":37988,"date":"2019-03-27T01:00:49","date_gmt":"2019-03-27T05:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=37988"},"modified":"2019-02-27T08:31:37","modified_gmt":"2019-02-27T13:31:37","slug":"qotd-gossip-rumour-and-innuendo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2019\/03\/27\/qotd-gossip-rumour-and-innuendo\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Gossip, rumour, and innuendo"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rumor was rife in the village as in the science fiction community. It should be. Both are the province of women. Not that men didn\u2019t gossip\/egg women on in the village, as they do in the science fiction community, but the men stupid enough to be seen doing it openly had a special name attached to them \u201cTricoteiros<\/em>.\u201d It was not a complementary name. And most men really didn\u2019t get involved. They merely went along with what their wives decided and decreed. People who imagine women powerless in true patriarchal societies are out of their minds. Once the \u201ccourt of public opinion\u201d which is largely female, makes a decision, men risk falling victim to it, should they not conform to its dictates.<\/p>\n

And this is why I loathe and despise rumor, and will stand up for a victim of it, no matter how little I like him or her: or indeed how little I know him or her. I will stand up for the victim, because rumor is a ridiculous way of ascertaining if someone should be \u201ca part of society\u201d (remember the charming moppets who said someone should be \u201ccast out of society\u201d for saying bad things) or if someone should have a job or if someone should be allowed to live somewhere in peace.<\/p>\n

Because the one thing rumor is not concerned with is truth or true guilt, or even gradations of guilt. Yes, perhaps everything rumor says is true. Heaven knows it\u2019s been known to happen, which is when people say \u201cno smoke without fire\u201d but they ignore all the times their stories and whispers were ALL wrong.<\/p>\n

For instance, before I got married to Dan everyone knew (based on TRUST me little more than a resemblance in coloring) he was a baker from a neighboring village, whom I\u2019d met in Italy. What was true to this tissue? Well, I was getting married and the year before, I was in Germany. (I\u2019m still confused as to how Italy got attached to it.) Which was okay because I had no reputation to speak of. The life I lived in gossip was far more interesting than my real life. Having grown up as the \u201clittle sister\u201d of my brother\u2019s group of friends, they (and I) never paid any attention to the fact I was now past puberty. This meant if they saw me trudging towards the train and they happened to be driving, they\u2019d pick me up and take me where I was supposed to go (mostly college or home) and if they were at a coffee shop and I walked by, they\u2019d call me to sit and grab a coffee and a pastry (which they paid for, as older siblings will. Since my brother is around ten years older than I, most of them had jobs while I was in high school.) BUT the gossips knew I was having affairs will all of them (what a busy critter I must have been, what with carrying a heavier-than-full-load of courses and tutoring on the side, all this while having boyfriends\/fiances. So when I got married, of course the best I could do was the baker from the nearby, poorer village. (Rolls eyes.) Which fortunately Dan couldn\u2019t care less about, since when I told him the rumors he went off in whoops of laughter at the idea that his geeky, introverted fiance could ever be the village hussy.<\/p>\n

Sarah Hoyt, “Painted All In Tongues”, According to Hoyt<\/em><\/a>, 2017-03-20.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rumor was rife in the village as in the science fiction community. It should be. Both are the province of women. Not that men didn\u2019t gossip\/egg women on in the village, as they do in the science fiction community, but the men stupid enough to be seen doing it openly had a special name attached […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,41],"tags":[262,557,85,43],"class_list":["post-37988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-quotations","tag-culture","tag-portugal","tag-sf","tag-women"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9SI","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37988"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37988\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37989,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37988\/revisions\/37989"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}