The 'invasion of privacy' involved in gossip is particularly relevant for the reserved and inhibited English, for whom privacy is an especially serious matter. It is impossible to overstate the importance of privacy in English culture. Jeremy Paxman points out that: 'The importance of privacy informs the entire organization of the country, from the assumptions on which laws are based, to the buildings in which the English live.' George Orwell observes that: 'The most hateful of all names in an English ear is Nosy Parker.'
I would add that a disproportionate number of our most influential social rules and maxims are concerned with the maintenance of privacy: we are taught to mind our own business, not to pry, to keep ourselves to ourselves, not to make a scene or a fuss or draw attention to ourselves, and never to wash our dirty linen in public. It is worth noting here that 'How are you?' is only treated as a 'real' question among very close personal friends or family; everywhere else, the automatic, ritual response is 'Fine, thanks', 'OK, thanks', 'Oh, mustn't grumble', 'Not bad, thanks' or some equivalent, whatever your physical or mental state. If you are terminally ill, it is acceptable to say 'Not bad, considering'.
As a result, thanks to the inevitable forbidden-fruit effect, we are a nation of curtain-twitchers, endlessly fascinated by the tabooed private lives of the 'members of our social setting'. The English may not gossip much more than any other culture, but our privacy rules significantly enhance the value of gossip. The laws of supply and demand ensure that gossip is a precious social commodity among the English. 'Private' information is not given away lightly or cheaply to all and sundry, but only to those we know and trust.
This is one of the reasons why foreigners often complain that the English are cold, reserved, unfriendly and stand-offish. In most other cultures, revealing basic personal data - your name, what you do for a living, whether you are married or have children, where you live - is no big deaclass="underline" in England, extracting such apparently trivial information from a new acquaintance can be like pulling teeth - every question makes us wince and recoil.
The Guessing-game Rule
It is not considered entirely polite, for example, to ask someone directly 'What do you do?', although if you think about it, this is the most obvious question to put to a new acquaintance, and the easiest way to start a conversation. But in addition to our privacy scruples, we English seem to have a perverse need to make social life difficult for ourselves, so etiquette requires us to find a more roundabout, indirect way of discovering what people do for a living. It can be most amusing to listen to the tortured and devious lengths to which English people will go to ascertain a new acquaintance's profession without actually asking the forbidden question. The guessing game, which is played at almost every middle-class social gathering where people are meeting each other for the first time, involves attempting to guess a person's occupation from 'clues' in remarks made about other matters.
A comment about traffic problems in the local area, for example, will elicit the response 'Oh, yes, it's a nightmare - and the rush hour is even worse: do you drive to work?' The other person knows exactly what question is really intended, and will usually obligingly answer the unspoken enquiry as well as the spoken one, saying something like: 'Yes, but I work at the hospital, so at least I don't have to get into the town centre.' The questioner is now allowed to make a direct guess: 'Oh, the hospital - you're a doctor, then?' (When two or three possible occupations are indicated, it is polite to name the highest-status one as a first guess - doctor rather than nurse, porter or medical student; solicitor rather than secretary. Also, even though an explicit guess is permitted at this stage, it is best expressed as an interrogative statement, rather than as a direct question.)
Everyone knows the rules of this game, and most people tend to offer helpful 'clues' early in the conversation, to speed the process along. Even if you are shy, embarrassed about your job, or trying to be enigmatic, it is considered very rude to prolong the clue-hunting stage of the game for too long, and once someone makes an explicit guess, you are obliged to reveal your occupation. It is almost equally impolite to ignore any obvious 'clue-dropping' by your new acquaintance. If (to continue the medical theme) he or she mentions in passing that 'My surgery is just round the corner from here', you are honour-bound to hazard a guess: 'Oh, so - you're a GP?'
When the person's occupation is finally revealed, it is customary, however boring or predictable this occupation might be, to express surprise. The standard response to 'Yes, I am a doctor [or teacher, accountant, IT manager, secretary, etc.]' is 'Oh, really?!' as though the occupation were both unexpected and fascinating. This is almost invariably followed by an embarrassed pause, as you search desperately for an appropriate comment or question about the person's profession - and he or she tries to think of something modest, amusing, but somehow also impressive, to say in response.
Similar guessing-game techniques are often used to find out where people live, whether they are married, what school or university they went to, and so on. Some direct questions are more impolite than others. It is less rude, for example, to ask 'Where do you live?' than 'What do you do?', but even this relatively inoffensive question is much better phrased in a more indirect manner, such as 'Do you live nearby?', or even more obliquely 'Have you come far?' It is more acceptable to ask whether someone has children than to ask whether he or she is married, so the former question is generally used as a roundabout way of prompting clues that will provide the answer to the latter. (Many married English males do not wear wedding rings, so the children question is often used by single females to encourage them to reveal their marital status. This can only be done in an appropriate conversational context, however, as asking the children question 'out of the blue' would be too obvious an attempt to ascertain a male's availability.)
The guessing-game rituals allow us, eventually, to elicit this kind of rudimentary census-form information, but the English privacy rules ensure that any more interesting details about our lives and relationships are reserved for close friends and family. This is 'privileged' information, not to be bandied about indiscriminately. The English take a certain pride in this trait, and sneer at the stereotyped Americans who 'tell you all about their divorce, their hysterectomy and their therapist within five minutes of meeting you'. This cliche, although not entirely without foundation, probably tells us more about the English and our privacy rules than it does about the Americans.
Incidentally, the English privacy rules, especially the taboo on 'prying', can make life quite difficult for the hapless social researcher whose life-blood data can only be obtained by constant prying. Many of the findings in this book were discovered the hard way, by pulling metaphorical teeth, or, more often, desperately trying to find sneaky tricks and stratagems that would help me to get round the privacy rules. Still, the process of devising and experimenting with such tricks led me to the identification of some unexpected and interesting rules, such as the distance rule.
The Distance Rule
Among the English, gossip about one's own private doings is reserved for intimates; gossip about the private lives of friends and family is shared with a slightly wider social circle; gossip about the personal affairs of acquaintances, colleagues and neighbours with a larger group; and gossip about the intimate details of public figures' or celebrities' lives with almost anyone. This is the distance rule. The more 'distant' from you the subject of gossip, the wider the circle of people with whom you may gossip about that person.