I was just about to hit +1 until I saw the explanation of gossip as "to relate tidbits of news to another person". If you cover gossip at all, can you say it in a way that explains why some people would do it the immersed, unrestrained, merry fashion suggested by the passage?

I was in the act of writing that last sentence about gossip as you left your comment. The first part was about away.

But in any case, I'm focusing on the meaning of the phrase, and wouldn't want to get into why someone would merrily gossip. I try to stay clear of psychology, especially when it involves stereotypical behavior.

I'm thinking that gossip is usually negative and behind someone's back, so engaging in it is a dirty sort of pleasure, but one that people often get immersed in. "Gossiping away" is thus a kind of shameful self-indulgence. I don't think you need to explicitly spell all that out, just explain it in such a way as to hint or imply the negative aspect of gossip. For example, TV newsreaders aren't normally accused of gossiping. (If you don't want to, I'll either take a crack at another answer or get back to working on what I should be doing right now…)

Gossip doesn't have to be malicious, Ben. There is benign gossip. That's why I called it "tidbits of news". There is no "shameful self-indulgence" here. The news could be about what happened to the neighbor's cat at the vet, or that the boy down the street who delivers the newspapers had his bicycle stolen.

It doesn't have to be malicious, but you know the word's center of gravity is a long way from mere transmission of news. Anyway, we can respectfully disagree, and I'm three minutes late starting work… :)

No, I know rather that the word doesn't have a "center of gravity". I've appended a P.S. to my answer.

Totally on a tangent here: Could you explain more of what you meant when you said that the word "gossip" doesn't have a center of gravity?

That was your term, which I understood to mean "core meaning". In the sentence where you used it, you misstate my impromptu description of "gossip". I said it was relaying "tidbits of news" which you restated as "mere transmission of news". These "tidbits" can be about serious issues which people would prefer to keep private or about trivial things that no one would even think of trying to keep private.

To assert that the "center" lies with the one sort of tidbit rather than the other is merely a personal bias.

BTW, the chat interface is broken on my browser (Chrome). The chat entry box is at the very bottom of the browser window, and is partially truncated, so that I cannot see the drag handle at the bottom right corner.

OK, thanks for explaining—especially while handicapped by browser/HTML/annoyances. …