Can you keep a secret?

“Can you keep a secret?” – I asked Greg.
“Of course I can, you know me!” – He answered.
Greg was perfectly fine with the idea of hearing something that he was not supposed to hear. On my side I was ready to tell something that I was not supposed to tell; to somebody that was not supposed to hear it. Well, one way or another, a simple word could describe this whole process: gossip.

While reading Michael Ondaatje’s “Running in the family” and Kathleen Norris’s “Dakota”, I get exactly this feeling – like they are telling me secrets that I am not supposed to hear, something very personal, something that I am not supposed to tell to anybody else. I get the feeling that we are gossiping.
In Old English, gossip - or god-sibb - originally meant a person related to one in God, specifically referring to a woman's close female friends at the birth of a child (those she would choose to be godparents to her child). The word later came to mean more generally a close (...