gossip

   This is no longer used as a term of address, though in Shakespeare’s time it would have been quite normal, especially when linked with a surname. Married women who were friends seem to have been the main users of the term: ‘What hoa, gossip Ford, what hoa!’ says Mistress Page to Mistress Ford, in The Merry Wives of Windsor. In Henry the Fourth Part Two, Hostess Quickly reminds Falstaff that goodwife Keech, the butcher’s wife, had come in while they were talking and called her ‘gossip Quickly’. At this time (seventeenth century) the word must have had the sense of female friend, though it had begun centuries previously as ‘God’s sib’, i.e. a God relation, a god-father or god-mother. It was ultimately extended to a woman’s female friends who were invited to be present at a birth. The modern meaning of ‘gossip’, idle talk about other people, arose from the kinds of conversation that occurred while the women were together, secluded from the men-folk.