you know...you can't call yourself a gossip if you can't gossip about people you don't know. here's the situation: i was talking to someone who *says* that they are a gossip and explaining the situation from last night. and they were like "big deal -- i don't know who you are talking about" and that wasn't the point. the point was the thrill of the story, the thrill of the situation that lets us talk about the situation in general. surely this person had something to add from other scenarios of people that they did know, right? you don't have to know the people in question to know people like the people or to recognize some part of yourself in the story. and that's the main point of gossip anyway...or at least i think it is. it's all about the human condition -- what would we do or what have we done in that situation and how does that compare to what other people have done and what can we learn from what other people have done. it's social benchmarking if you want a term for it. yuck...that's a shitty term. let me re-think that one a bit...