Nancy Mitford, forgotten arch-priest of gossiphood, writes to one of her sisters, in the Forties, about Louis XIV’s nephew. He was a legendary libertine and, in his love of gossip, a kindred spirit to Nancy, who writes how “his last words, to a pretty Duchess, were ‘Alors racontez’ & he fell dead”. The editor of the Mitford sisters’ letters translates these last words as “Well, tell!” This insatiable, irrepressible and unabashed appetite for gossip is what sets people apart from animals, according to a cutting-edge British scientist’s recent pronouncement. Like many such earth-shattering revelations made by modern science, this is a truth of nature that human beings have known, suffered and savoured for a very long time. Gossip is an ancient word, going back to early-medieval English, where its meaning was far more virtuous than it is today: god + sib = ‘akin to god’. But in the 16th century, the word rapidly evolved in a wicked direction — and the OED shows that Shakespeare had more than a little to do with this. It is a fascinating tale of how a word that started out as meaning a special kind of closeness to god came to stand for quite another kind of closeness: the intimate comfort of sharing the perverse joys of trivial malice with select others. Gossip has always been about sharing and bonding, but without any of the connotations of wholesomeness that these activities usually have in the lives of good people. In a tart little novel, Henry James writes about a great London salon “where the talk is always good, especially when it is bad”.

But even with James and the Mitford sisters as its high priests, gossipdom is far from being an exclusively patrician realm. Originally associated with the earthiness of midwives and boon-companions, it is an activity that reduces conversation to a sort of tribal ritual, with its own secrecy and sinisterness, its own, almost magical, kinship with human harm. If conversation is white magic, then gossip is a black art. It is driven by energies that are not part of the rational world of sweetness and light. That is why one can never be sure that, as an activity, it is all that exaltedly human — that is, set apart from the animal. Think of the quietly organized intentness of ants as they kiss and whisper to one another, ostensibly about which way to head for a grain of sugar. Think of the twittering of birds and the chattering of apes, of monkeys picking one another’s lice in the sun. Some of the instincts of the herd surely go into the keeping together of circles of human gossip.

What is purely human, though, are the finesse and the glee. It is true that people often gossip because they want something out of it — information, power, or what would now be called the accumulation of social capital. This is, after all, the age of networking, and networking is never too far from go-getting. It would be sad to forget that gossiping is ultimately an art. And, as with all art, gossip, at its best, is perfectly useless, and sublime.