People love gossip. That is one of the driving forces behind Twitter, which allows access to raw stories, untouched by journalistic checking, filtering and, in some cases, distorting.But what is gossip? You might call it idle chatter, or groundless rumour, or tittle-tattle. But that is a relatively new meaning, emerging only in the early nineteenth century. Before that, the word “gossip” had quite a different meaning.It goes back to Old English, when it was written godsibb. That was a compound of two words, “god”, meaning god, and “sib”, meaning related by blood. A godsibb then was a godfather or godmother. The OED’s first citation is from Archbishop Wulfstan’s “Sermon of the Wolf to the English”, written in 1014: &ldqu